all things being broken
The moon returning in her blood
looks down grows white
loses color
and blazes
…and the near star gone—
voices of cities
drumming in the moon
bleeding of my right hand
my black voice bleeding
LOOKING
Battles whose names I do not know
Weapons whose wish they dare not teach
Wars whose need they will not show
Tear us tear us each from each,
O my dear
Great sun and daily touch.
Fallen beside a river in Europe,
Burned to grey ash in Africa,
Lain down in the California jail,
O my dear,
Great sun and daily touch.
Flaming in Asia today.
I saw you stare out over Canada
As I stare over the Hudson River.
DON BATY, THE DRAFT RESISTER
I Muriel stood at the altar-table
The young man Don Baty stood with us
I Muriel fell away in me
in dread but in a welcoming
I am Don Baty then I said
before the blue-coated police
ever entered and took him.
I am Don Baty, say we all
we eat our bread, we drink our wine.
Our heritance has come, we know,
your arrest is mine. Yes.
Beethoven saying Amen Amen Amen Amen Amen
and all a singing, earth and eyes,
strong and weaponless.
There is a pounding at the door;
now we bring our lives entire.
I am Don Baty. My dear, my dear,
in a kind of welcoming,
here we meet, here we bring
ourselves. They pound on the wall of time.
The newborn are with us singing.
TE HANH : LONG-AGO GARDEN
The long-ago garden is green deepened on green
Day after day our mother's hair, whiter
We are all far away, each at our own work
When do we return to the long-ago garden?
We are a shining day following rain
Like the sun like the moon
The morning star, evening star, they never cross over
When will we go back to the long-ago garden?
We are summer lotus, autumn chrysanthemum,
Ripe tenth-month fig, and fifth-month dragon-eye
You followed the eighth-month migratory birds
Third month, I left with those who crossed over
You went back into the house one day in spring
I was out picking guava, Mother said
You looked up at the tree-top, where the wind blew through
The leaves touched; lips, speaking my name
When I returned one summer day,
You were at the well washing clothes, Mother said
I looked in the pure deep water past the well-rim
Saw only the surface and myself, alone
The long-ago garden is green deepened on green
Day after day our mother's hair, whiter
We are all far away, each at our work
When will we return to the long-ago garden?
WELCOME FROM WAR
The woman to the man :
What is that on your hands?
It is also on my hands.
What is that in your eyes?
You see it in my eyes, do you?
Is your sex intact? Is mine?
Can it be about life now?
You went out to war.
War came over our house.
Our bed is not the same.
We will set about beginnings.
I kiss your hands, I kiss your eyes,
I kiss your sex.
I will kiss, I will bless
all the beginnings.
FACING SENTENCING
Children remembering sadness grieve, they grieve.
But sadness is not so terrible. Children
Grown old speak of fear saying, we are to
Fear only this fear itself. But fear is not to be so feared.
Numbness is. To stand before my judge
Not knowing what I mean : to walk up
To him, my judge, and back to nobody
For the courtroom is almost empty, the world
Is almost silent, and suppose we did not know
This power to fall into each other's eyes
And say We love; and say We know each other
And say among silence We will help stop this war.
SECRETS OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
for Staughton Lynd
Jefferson spoke of freedom but he held slaves.
Were ten of them his sons by black women?
Did he sell them? or was his land their graves?
Do we asking our questions become more human?
Are our lives the parable which, living,
We all have, we all know, we all can move?
Then they said : The earth belongs to the living,
We refuse allegiance, we resign office, and we love.
They are writing at their desks, the thinking fathers,
They do not recognize their live sons' faces;
Slave and slaveholder they are chained together
And one is ancestor and one is child.
Escape the birthplace; walk into the world
Refusing to be either slave or slaveholder.
WHEREVER
Wherever
we walk
we will make
Wherever
we protest
we will go planting
Make poems
seed grass
feed a child growing
build a house
Whatever we stand against
We will stand feeding and seeding
Wherever
I walk
I will make
BRINGING
Bringing their life these young
bringing their life rise from their wakings
bringing their life come to a place
where they make their gifts
The grapes of life of death of transformation
round they hang at hand desires like peace
or seed of revolutions that make all things new
and must be lived out, washed in rivers, and themselves made new
and bringing their life the young they reach
in their griefs their mistakes their discovering
bringing their life they touch they take
bringing their life they come to a place
It is raining fire they are bringing their life
their sex speaks for them their ideas all speak
their acts arrive bringing their life entire
They resist a system of wars and rewards
They offer their open faces they offer their bodies
They offer their hands bringing their life entire
They offer their life they are their own gifts
Make life resist resist make life
Bringing their life entire they come to this moment
Bringing their life entire they come to this place
A LOUIS SONNET
for Louis Untermeyer, his 80th birthday
The jokes, the feuds, the puns, the punishments,
This traditional man being brave, going in grace,
Finding the structure of lives more than perfected line;
The forms of poetry are his time and space.
He's quirky, he rhymes like daily life; light wine
Is all his flavor, till fierce reverence
Turns delicatessen into delicatesse—
The man who anthologizes experience.
He is anthologized; like a wave of the sea
He is here, he is there, he changes; impossibly,
He is blue surface,
green suspended, the dark deep notes.
A stain of brilliance spreading upward floats
In luminous air; we are luminous, he makes us be
The jokes of Job and Heine's anecdotes.
AFTER MELVILLE
for Bett and Walter Bezanson
1
The sea-coast looks at the sea, and the cities pour.
The sea pours embassies of music : murder-sonata, birth-sonata,
the seashore celebrates the deep ocean.
Ocean dreaming all day all night of mountains
lifts a forehead to the wakes of stars;
one star dives into a still circle : birth, known to all.
A shore of the sea, one man as the shore of the sea;
one young man lying out over configurations of water
never two wave-patterns the same, never two same dreamings.
He writes these actualities, these dreamings,
transformed into themselves, his acts, his islands,
his animals ourselves within his full man's hand.
Bitter contempt and bitter poverty,
Judaean desert of our life, being locked
in white in black, a lock of essences.
Not graves not ocean but ourselves tonight
swing in his knowledge, his living and its wake,
travelling in the sea that goes pouring, dreaming
where we flash in our lifetime wave, these breathing shallows
of a shore that looks at the deep land, this island
that looks forever at the sea; deep sexual sea
that breathes one man at the shoreline of emergence.
He is the sea we carry to our star.
2
They come into our lives, Melville and Whitman who
ran contradictions of cities and the one-sparing sea
held in the long male arms—Identify.
They enter our evenings speaking—Melville and Crane
taking the wars of our parentage, silence and smoke,
tearing the live man open till we wake.
Emily Dickinson, Melville in our breathing,
isolate among powers, telling us the sea
and the slow dance of the absence of the sea.
Hawthorne whose forehead knew the revelation—
how can we receive the vision at noonday?
Move with the revelation? Move away?
More violent than Melville diving the sea deeper
no man has ever gone. He swims our world
violence and dream safe only in full danger.
Revealing us, who are his afterlife.
3
A woman looks at the sea.
Woman in whose waiting is held ocean
faces the other sea where his life drowns and is saved,
recurrent singing, the reborn wave.
A man looking into the sea.
He sails, he swims among the opposites,
diving, making a life among many unknowns,
he takes for his knowledge the future wake of stars.
The sea looking and not looking.
Among the old enemies, a transparent lake.
Wars of the sea and land, wars of air; space;
against the corroded wars and sources of wars, a lake of being born.
A man and a woman look into each other.
One man giving us forever the grapes of the sea.
Gives us marriage; gives us suicide and birth; he drowns
for the sake of our look into each other's body and life.
Allowing the great life : sex, time, the feeding powers.
He is part of our look into each other's face.
THE WRITER
for Isaac Bashevis Singer
His tears fell from his veins
They spoke for six million
From his veins all their blood.
He told his stories.
But noone spoke this language
Noone knew this music.
His music went into all people
Not knowing this language.
It ran through their bodies
And they began to take his words
Everyone the tears
Everyone the veins
But everyone said
Noone spoke this language.
GRADUS AD PARNASSUM
Oh I know
If I'd practised the piano
I'd never be so low
As I now am
Where's Sylvia Beerman?
Married, rich and cool
In New Rochelle
She was nobody's fool,
She didn't write in verse
She hardly wrote at all
She rose she didn't fall
She never gave a damn
But got up early
To practise Gradus
Ad Parnassum—she
Feels fine. I know.
FROM A PLAY : PUBLISHER'S SONG
I lie in the bath and I contemplate the toilet-paper:
Scottissue, 1000 sheets—
What a lot of pissin and shittin,
What a lot of pissin and shittin,
Enough for the poems of Shelley and Keats—
All the poems of Shelley and Keats.
IN THE NIGHT THE SOUND WOKE US
In the night the sound woke us.
We went up to the deck.
Brightness of brightness in the black night.
The ship standing still, her hold wide open.
Light shining orange on the lumber
her cargo, fresh strong-smelling wood.
A tall elder sailor standing at the winches,
his arms still, down; not seeming to move,
his hands hidden behind
black leather balcony.
The silver-hair tall sailor, stern and serene his face
turning from side to side.
The winches fell and rose with the newborn wood.
Orange and blazing in the lights it rose.
Vancouver straits, a northern midnight.
Delivered from death I stood awake
seeing it brought to the cool shining air.
O death, skillful, at night, in the bright light
bringing to birth.
Over my head
I see it in the air.
IN THE UNDERWORLD
I go a road
among the upturned
faces in their colors
to the great arch
of a theatre stage
I the high queen
starting in the air
far above my head
royal of the crown
I the tower
go through the wide arch
proscenium queen
The arch shuts down like December
very small all about me
the entrance to this country
Many whispers in the quick dark
Fingers in swarms, breath is busy,
they have reached above my head
and taken off my crown
I go and I go
I have been searching
since the light of all mornings
I remember only a pale brightness
and no more. What do I remember?
I no longer
They have reached to my jewels
green in this cave, that one, iceberg the blue,
whirled into diamond
in the deep dark taken.
I move into thicker dark,
moss, earth-smell, wet coal.
Their hands are on my stiff robe.
I walk out of my robe.
At my surfaces
they unfasten my dress of softness.
Naked the naked wind
of the underworld.
Rankness at my breasts,
over my flank
giggle and stink
They have taken little knives
my skin lifts off
I go in pain-colored black
trying to
find
I walk into their asking
Where is he
they sing on one note
Your lord memory
He your delight
I cannot hear their music
it scrapes along my muscles
they make my flesh go
among the gusts and whispers
they take off my eyes
my lips no more
the delicate fierce places
of identity
everywhere
taken
I, despoiled and clacking
walk, a chain of bones
into the boneyard dark.
One by one.
Something
reaches for my bones.
Something walks here
a little breath in hell
without its ghost.
A breath after nothing.
Gone.
Nothing turns the place
where perceiving was
from side to side.
There is no place. It has dissolved.
The lowest point, back there, has slid away.
—What are you working on?
—Istar in the underworld.
—Baby, you are in trouble.
What calls her?
The body of a woman alive
but at the point of death,
the very old body lying there riddled with life,
gone, gasping at pain,
fighting for words
fighting for breath.
One clear breast looks up out of this gone body
young, the white clear light of this breast
speaks across distance
Remember is
come back.
Remember is
Who is here?
I am here.
At the pit of the underworld
something flickers in her
without anything
Now I remember love
who has set my being on me,
who permits me move
into all being,
who puts on me perceiving
and my bones
in a live chain
and my flesh that perceives
and acts
and my acknowledging skin
my underdress, my dress
and my robe
the jewels of the world
I touch and find
—I know him and I know
the breast speaking
out of a gone woman
across distances
And my crown a tower.
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 49
