sing to each other.
3 FOR DOLCI
Angel of declaring, you opened before us walls,
the lives of children, water as power.
To control the water is to control our days,
to build a dam is to face the enemy.
We will form a new person who will step forward,
he it is, she it is, assumes full life,
fully responsible. We will bring all the children,
they will decide together.
We will ask these children : what is before you?
They will say what they see.
They will say what they don't see.
Once again we breathe in discovery.
A man, a woman,
will discover
we are each other's sources.
4 CONCRETE
They are pouring the city:
they tear down the towers,
grind their lives,
laughing tainted, the river
flows down to tomorrow.
They are setting the forms,
pouring the new buildings.
Our days pour down.
I am pouring my poems.
5 BRECHT'S GALILEO
Brecht saying : Galileo talking astronomy
Stripped to the torso, the intellectual life
Pouring from this gross man in his nakedness.
Galileo, his physical contentment
Is having his back rubbed by his student; the boy mauls;
The man sighs and transforms it; intellectual product!
Galileo spins a toy of the earth around
The spinning sun; he looks at the student boy.
Learning is teaching, teaching is learning.
Galileo
Demonstrates how horrible is betrayal,
Particularly on the shore of a new era.
6 READING THE KIEU
There was always a murder within another murder.
Red leaves and rosy threads bind them together.
The hero of Vietnam's epic is a woman
and she has sold herself to save her father.
Odor of massacres spread on the sky.
Loneliness, the windy, dusty world.
The roads crowded with armor and betrayal.
Mirror of the sun and moon, this land,
in which being handed to soldiers is the journey.
Shame, disgrace, change of seas into burnt fields.
Banners, loudspeakers, violation of each day,
everything being unjust. But she does save him,
and we find everything in another way.
7 THE FLOOR OF OCEAN
Sistine Chapel
Climbing the air, prophet beyond prophet
leaning upon creation backward to the first
creation the great spark of night
breathing sun energy a gap between finger-tips
across all of space or nothing, infinity.
But beyond this, with this, these
arms raising reaching wavering
as from the floor of ocean
wavering showing swaying like sea-plants
pointing straight up closing the gap between
continual creation and the daily touch.
8 H. F. D.
From you I learned the dark potential
theatres of the acts of man holding
on a rehearsal stage people and lights.
You in your red hair ran down the darkened
aisle, making documents and poems
in their people form the play.
Hallie it was from you I learned this:
you told the company in dress-rehearsal
in that ultimate equipped building what they lacked:
among the lighting, the sight-lines, the acoustics,
the perfect revolving stage, they lacked only one thing
the most important thing. It would come tonight:
The audience the response
Hallie I learned from you this summer, this
Hallie I saw you lying all gone to bone
the tremor of bone I stroked the head all sculpture
I held the hands of birds I spoke to the sealed eyes
the soft live red mouth of a red-headed woman.
I knew Hallie then I could move without answer,
like the veterans for peace, hurling back their medals
and not expecting an answer from the grass.
You taught me this in your dying, for poems and theatre
and love and peace-making that living and my love
are where response and no-response
meet at last, Hallie, in infinity.
9 THE ARTIST AS SOCIAL CRITIC
They have asked me to speak in public
and set me a subject.
I hate anything that begins : the artist as…
and as for “social critic”
at the last quarter of the twentieth century
I know what that is:
late at night, among radio music
the voice of my son speaking half-world away
coming clear on the radio into my room
out of blazing Belfast.
Long enough for me to walk around
in that strong voice.
10 THE PRESIDENT AND THE LASER BOMB
He speaks in a big voice through all the air
saying : we have made strength,
we have made a beginning,
we will have lasting peace.
Something shouts on the river.
All night long the acts speak:
the new laser bomb falls impeccably
along the beam of a strict light
finding inevitably a narrow footbridge
in Asia.
11 NOT SEARCHING
What did I miss as I went searching?
What did I not see?
I renounce all this regret.
Now I will make another try.
One step and I am free.
When it happens to us again and again,
sometimes we know it for we are prepared
but to discover, to live at the edge of things,
to fall out of routine into invention
and recognize at the other edge of ocean
a new kind of man a new kind of woman
walking toward me into the little surf.
This is the next me and the next child
daybreak in continual creation.
Dayray we see, we say,
we sing what we don't see.
Picasso saying : I don't search, I find!
And in us our need, the traces of the future,
the egg and its becoming.
I come to you searching and searching.
12 THE QUESTION
After this crisis,
nothing being conquered,
the theme is set:
to move with the forces,
how to go on
from the moment that
changed our life,
the moment of revelation,
proceeding from the crisis,
from the dream,
and not from the moment
of sleep before it?
13
Searching/not searching. To make closeness.
For if this communication was the truth,
then it was this communication itself
which was the value to be supported.
And for this communication to endure,
men and women must move freely. And to make
this communication renew itself always
we must renew justice.
And to make this communication
lasting, we must live to eliminate
violence and the lie.
Yes, we set the communication
we have achieved
against the world of murder.
Searching/not searching.
after Camus, 1946
14
What did I
see? What did I not see?
The river flowing past my window.
The night-lit city. My white pointed light.
Pieces of world away
within my room.
Unseen and seen, the bodies within my life.
Voices under the leaves of Asia,
and America, in sex, in possibility.
We are trying to make, to let our closeness be made,
not torn apart tonight by our dead skills.
The shadow of my hand.
The shadow of the pen.
Morning of the day we reach or do not reach.
In our bodies, we find each other.
On our mouths, inner greet,
in our eyes.
A SIMPLE EXPERIMENT
When a magnet is
struck by a hammer
the magnetism spills out of
the iron.
The molecules
are jarred,
they are a mob going
in all directions
The magnet is
shockéd back
it is no magnet but
simple iron.
There is no more
of its former
kind of accord
or force.
But if you take
another magnet
and stroke the iron
with this,
it can be
remagnetized
if you stroke it
and stroke it,
stroke it
stroke it,
the molecules
can be given
their tending grace
by a strong magnet
stroking stroking
always in the same direction,
of course.
ALONG HISTORY
Along history, forever
some woman dancing,
making shapes on the air;
forever a man
riding a good horse,
sitting the dark horse well,
his penis erect with
fantasy
BOYS OF THESE MEN FULL SPEED
for Jane Cooper
Boys of these men
full speed across free,
my father's boyhood eyes.
Sail-skating with friends
bright on Wisconsin ice
those years away.
Sails strung across their backs
boys racing toward
fierce bitter middle-age
in the great glitter of
corrupted cities.
Father, your dark mouth
speaking its rancor.
Alive not yet, the girl
I would become
stares at that ice
stippled with skaters,
a story you tell.
Boys of those men
call across winter
where I stand and shake,
woman of that girl.
ALL THE LITTLE ANIMALS
“You are not pregnant,” said the man
with the probe and the white white coat;
“Yes she is,” said all the little animals.
Then the great gynecologist examined. “You are not now,
and I doubt that you ever have been,” he said with
authority.
“Test me again.” He looked at his nurse and shrugged.
“Yes she is,” said all the little animals, and laid down their
lives for my son and me.
Twenty-one years later, my son a grown man and far away
at the other ocean,
I hear them : “Yes you are,” say all the little animals.
I see them, they move in great jumping procession through my waking hours,
those frogs and rabbits look at me with their round eyes,
they kick powerfully with their strong hind legs,
they lay down their lives in silence,
all the rabbits saying Yes, all the frogs saying Yes,
in the face of all men and all institutions,
all the doctors, all the parents, all the worldly friends, all the
psychiatrists, all the abortionists, all the lawyers.
The little animals whom I bless and praise and thank forever,
they are part of my living,
go leap through my waking and my sleep, go leap through
my life and my birth-giving and my death,
go leap through my dreams,
and my son's life
and whatever streams from him.
NEXT
after Charles Morice
Come : you are the one chosen, by them, to serve them.
Now, in the evening of L'Amour and La Mort.
Come : you are the one chosen, by them, to love them.
…The child perceives and the cycles are fulfilled.
Man's dead. Dead never to be reborn.
The Islands and Waters serve another lord,
New, better. His eyes are the flowering of light.
He is beautiful. The child smiles at him in his tears.
TWO YEARS
Two years of my sister's bitter illness;
the wind whips the river of her last spring.
I have burned the beans again.
IRIS
1
Middle of May, when the iris blows,
blue below blue, the bearded patriarchface
on the green flute body of a boy
Poseidon torso of Eros
blue
sky below sea
day over daybreak violet behind twilight
the May iris
midnight on midday
2
Something is over and under this deep blue.
Over and under this movement, etwas
before and after, alguna cosa
blue before blue
is it
perhaps
death?
That may be the wrong word.
The iris stands in the light.
3
Death is here, death is guarded by swords.
No. By shapes of swords
flicker of green leaves
under all the speaking and crying
shadowing the words the eyes here they all die
racing withering blue evening
my sister death the iris
stands clear in light.
4
In the water-cave
ferocious needles of teeth
the green morays
in blue water rays
a maleficence ribbon of green the flat look of
eyes staring fatal mouth staring
the rippling potent force
curving into any hole
death finding his way.
5
Depth of petals, May iris
transparent infinitely deep they are
petal-thin with light behind them
and you, death,
and you
behind them
blue under blue.
What I cannot say
in adequate music
something being born
transparency blue of
light standing on light
this stalk of
(among mortal petals-and-leaves)
light
2 Orange and Grape
BALLAD OF ORANGE AND GRAPE
After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you've read your reading
after you've written your say—
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and across the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century.
Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack—
sticking out of the crummy garage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who'd l
ike to break your back.
But here's a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose and pink, too.
Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog-man leans—
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking.
I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked ORANGE
orange in the one marked GRAPE,
the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
and orange drink in the GRAPE.
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, on each machine.
I ask him : How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read?—
How can they write and believe what they're writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE—?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write
and we hear and we say and we do?)
He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be white and black women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don't do.
On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE,
pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.
ROCK FLOW, RIVER MIX
Flickering
in the buildings
they dance now
hip face and knee
dances I hunted for
when at nineteen
I stood at the river
here, the Hudson
hunting for Africa—
something rumored
caught, poured in shadow and light
face of ecstasy
on film
swivel neck, eternal smile
suffer the night
water flows down
to
today
black theatre, road dusted with light
streaking down over our heads
setting before us, around us
sound track
image track
MARTIN LUTHER KING, MALCOLM X
Bleeding of the mountains
the noon bleeding
he is shot through the voice
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 48
