Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  and Zig Zag Zag that last letter

  of a secret or forgotten alphabet

  shaped like our own last letter but it means

  Something in our experience you do not know

  When will it open open opening

  River-watching all night

  will the river

  swing open we are Asia and New York

  Bombs, roaches, mutilation River-watching

  Looking out at the river

  the city-flow seen as river

  the flow seen as a flow of possibility

  and I too to that sea.

  Summer repetitive. The machine screaming

  Beating outside, on the corrupted

  Waterfront.

  On my good days it appears digging

  And building,

  On others, its monstrous word

  Says on one note Gone, killed, laid waste.

  The whole thing—waterfront, war, city,

  sons, daughters, me—

  Must be re-imagined.

  Sun on the orange-red roof.

  Walking into the elevator at Westbeth

  Yelling in the empty stainless-steel

  Room like the room of this tormented year.

  Like the year

  The metal nor absorbs nor reflects

  My yelling.

  My pulled face looks at me

  From the steel walls.

  And then we go to Washington as if it were

  Jerusalem;

  and then we present our petition, clearly,

  rightfully;

  and then some of us walk away;

  and then do others of us stay;

  and some of us lie gravely down

  on that cool mosaic floor,

  the Senate.

  Washington! Your bombs rain down!

  I mourn, I lie down, I grieve.

  Written on the plane:

  The conviction that what is meant by the unconscious is the same as what is meant by history. The collective unconscious is the living history brought to the present in consciousness, waking or sleeping. The personal “unconscious” is the personal history. This is an identity.

  We will now explore further ways of reaching our lives, the new world. My own life, yours; this earth, this moon, this system, the “space” we share, which is consciousness.

  Turbulence of air now. A pause of nine minutes.

  Written on the plane. After turbulence:

  The movement of life : to live more fully in the present. This movement includes the work of bringing this history to “light” and understanding. The “unconscious” of the race, and its traces in art and in social structure and “inventions”—these are our inheritance. In facing history, we look at each other, and in facing our entire personal life, we look at each other.

  I want to break open. On the plane, a white cloud seen through rainbow. The rainbow is, optically, on the glass of the window.

  The jury said Guilty, Guilty, Guilty,

  Guilty, Guilty. Each closed face.

  I see myself in the river-window. River

  Slow going to its sea.

  An old, crushed, perverse, waiting,

  In loss, in dread, dead tree.

  COLUMBUS

  Inner greet. Greenberg said it,

  Even the tallest man needs inner greet.

  This is the great word

  brought back, in swinging seas. The new world.

  End of summer.

  Dark-red butterflies on the river

  Dark-orange butterflies in the city.

  The young men still going to war

  Or away from war, to the prisons, to other countries.

  To the high cold mountains, to the source of the river, I too go,

  Deeper into this room.

  A dream remembered only in other dreams.

  The voice saying:

  All you dreaded as a child

  Came to pass in storms of light;

  All you dreaded as a girl

  Falls and falls in avalanche—

  Dread and the dream of love will make

  All that time and men may build,

  All that women dance and make.

  They become you. Your own face

  Dances through the night and day,

  Leading your body into this

  Body-led dance, its mysteries.

  Answer me. Dance my dance.

  River-watching from the big Westbeth windows:

  Powerful miles of Hudson, an east-blowing wind

  All the way to Asia.

  No. Lost in our breath,

  Sobbing, lost, alone. The river darkens.

  Black flow, bronze lights, white lights.

  Something must answer that light, that dark.

  Love,

  The door opens, you walk in.

  The old man said, “The introversion of war

  Is the main task of our time.”

  Now it makes its poems, when the sky stops killing.

  I try to turn my acts inward and deeper.

  Almost a poem. If it splash outside,

  All right.

  My teacher says, “Go deeper.”

  The day when the salmon-colored flowers

  Open.

  I will essay. Go deeper.

  Make my poem.

  Going to prison. The clang of the steel door.

  It is my choice. But the steel door does clang.

  The introversion of this act

  Past its seeming, past all thought of effect,

  Until it is something like

  Writing a poem in my silent room.

  In prison, the thick air,

  still, loaded, heat on heat.

  Around your throat

  for the doors are locks,

  the windows are locked doors,

  the hot smell locked around us,

  the machine shouting at us,

  trying to sell us meat and carpets.

  In prison, the prisoners,

  all of us, all the objects,

  chairs, cots, mops, tables.

  Only the young cat.

  He does not know he is locked in.

  In prison, the prisoners.

  One black girl, 19 years.

  She has killed her child

  and she grieves, she grieves.

  She crosses to my bed.

  “What do Free mean?”

  I look at her.

  “You don't understand English.”

  “Yes, I understand English.”

  “What do Free mean?”

  In prison a

  brown paper bag

  I put it beside my cot.

  All my things.

  Comb, notebook, underwear,

  letterpaper, toothbrush, book.

  I am rich—

  they have given me another toothbrush.

  The guard saying:

  “You'll find people share here.”

  Photos, more precise than any face can be.

  The broken static moment, life never by

  any eye seen.

  My contradictions set me tasks, errands.

  This I know:

  What I reap, that shall I sow.

  How we live:

  I look into my face in the square glass.

  Under it, a bright flow of cold water.

  At once, a strong arrangement of presences:

  I am holding a small glass

  under the little flow

  at Fern Spring, among the western forest.

  A cool flaw among the silence.

  The taste of the waterfall.

  Some rare battered she-poet, old girl in the Village

  racketing home past low buildings some freezing night,

  come face to face with that broad roiling river.

  Nothing buried in her but is lit and transformed.

  BURNING THE DREAMS

  on a spring morning of young wood, green wood

  it will not burn, but the dreams bu
rn.

  My hands have ashes on them.

  They fear it

  and so they destroy the nearest things.

  DEATH AND THE DANCER

  Running from death

  throwing his teeth at the ghost

  dipping into his belly, staving off death with a throw

  tearing his brains out, throwing them at Death

  death-baby is being born

  scythe clock and banner come

  trumpet of bone and drum made of something—

  the callous-handed goddess

  her kiss is resurrection

  RATIONAL MAN

  The marker at Auschwitz

  The scientists torturing male genitals

  The learned scientists, they torture female genitals

  The 3-year-old girl, what she did to her kitten

  The collar made of leather for drowning a man in his chair

  The scatter-bomb with the nails that drive into the brain

  The thread through the young man's splendid penis

  The babies in flames. The thrust

  Infected reptile dead in the live wombs of girls

  We did not know we were insane.

  We do not know we are insane.

  We say to them : you are insane

  Anything you can imagine

  on punishable drugs, or calm and young

  with a fever of 105, or on your knees,

  with the word of Hanoi bombed

  with the legless boy in Bach Mai

  with the sons of man torn by man

  Rational man has done.

  Mercy, Lord. On every living life.

  In tall whirlpools of mirrors

  Unshapen body and face

  middle of the depth

  of a night that will not turn

  the unshapen all night

  trying for form

  I do and I do.

  Life and this under-war.

  Deep under protest, make.

  For we are makers more.

  but touching teaching going

  the young and the old

  they reach they break they are moving

  to make the world

  something about desire

  something about murder

  something about my death

  something about madness

  something about light

  something of breaking open

  sing me to sleep and morning

  my dreams are all a waking

  In the night

  wandering room to room of this world

  I move by touch

  and then something says

  let the city pour

  the sleep of the beloved

  Let the night pour down

  all its meanings

  Let the images pour

  the light is dreaming

  THE HOSTAGES

  When I stand with these three

  My new brothers my new sister

  These who bind themselves offering

  Hostages to go at a word, hostages

  to go deeper here among our own cities

  When I look into your faces

  Karl, Martin, Andrea.

  When I look into your faces

  Offered men and women, I can speak,

  And I speak openly on the church steps,

  At the peace center saying : We affirm

  Our closeness forever with the eyes in Asia,

  Those who resist the forces we resist.

  One more hostage comes forward, his eyes: Joe,

  With Karl, Martin, Andrea, me.

  And now alone in the river-watching room,

  Allen, your voice comes, the deep prophetic word.

  And we are one more, Joe, Andrea, Karl, Martin,

  Allen, me. The hostages. Reaching. Beginning.

  That I looked at them with my living eyes.

  That they looked at me with their living eyes.

  That we embraced.

  That we began to learn each other's language.

  It is something like the breaking open of my youth

  but unlike too, leading not only to consummation

  of the bed and of the edge of the sea.

  Although that, surely, also.

  But this music is

  itself

  needing only other selving

  It is defeated but a way is open:

  transformation

  Then came I entire to this moment

  process and light

  to discover the country of our waking

  breaking open

  The Gates

  1976

  1

  ST. ROACH

  For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,

  for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,

  they showed me by every action to despise your kind;

  for that I saw my people making war on you,

  I could not tell you apart, one from another,

  for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,

  for that all the people I knew met you by

  crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling

  water on you, they flushed you down,

  for that I could not tell one from another

  only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.

  Not like me.

  For that I did not know your poems

  And that I do not know any of your sayings

  And that I cannot speak or read your language

  And that I do not sing your songs

  And that I do not teach our children

  to eat your food

  or know your poems

  or sing your songs

  But that we say you are filthing our food

  But that we know you not at all.

  Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.

  You were lighter than the others in color, that was

  neither good nor bad.

  I was really looking for the first time.

  You seemed troubled and witty.

  Today I touched one of you for the first time.

  You were startled, you ran, you fled away

  Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.

  I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.

  DREAM-DRUMMING

  I braced the drum to my arm, a flat drum, and began to play.

  He heard me and she heard me. I had never seen this drum before.

  As I played, weakness went through me; weakness left me.

  I held my arms high, the drum and the soft-headed long stick

  I drummed past my tiredness vibrating weakness, past it into music,

  As in ragas past exhaustion into the country of all music.

  Held my arms high, became that vibration, drummed the sacrifice of my belly.

  He heard me, she heard me,

  I turned into the infinity figure, reaching down into

  the earth of music with my legs at last,

  Reaching up from the two circles, my pelvic sea,

  mountains and air of breast, with my arms up into music

  At last turned into music, drumming on that possessed

  vibration,

  Drumming my dream.

  DOUBLE ODE

  for Bill & Alison

  1

  Wine and oil gleaming within their heads,

  I poured it into the hollow of their bodies

  but they did not speak. The light glittered.

  Lit from underneath they were. Water

  pouring over her face, it

  made the lips move and the eyes move, she

  spoke:

  Break open.

  He did not speak.

  A still lake shining in his head,

  until I knew that the sun and the moon

  stood in me with one light.

  2

  They began to breathe and glitter. Morning

  overflowed, gifts
poured from their sex

  upon my throat and my breast.

  They knew. They laughed. In their tremendous games

  night revolved and shook my bed. I

  woke in a cold morning.

  Your presences

  allow me to begin to make myself

  carried on your shoulders, swayed in your arms.

  Something is flashing among the colors. I

  move without being allowed. I

  move with the blessing of the sky and the sea.

  3

  Tonight I will try again for the music of truth

  since this one and that one of mine are met with death.

  It is a blind lottery, a cheap military trumpet

  with all these great roots black under the earth

  while a muscle-legged man

  stamps in his red and gold

  rough wine, creatures in nets, swords through their spines

  and all their cantillation in our thought.

  Glitter and pedestal under my female powers

  a woman singing horses, blind cities of concrete, moon

  comes to moonrise as a dark daughter.

  I am the poet of the night of women

  and my two parents are the sun and the moon,

  a strong father of that black double likeness,

  a bell kicking out of the bell-tower,

  and a mother who shines and shines his light.

  Who is the double ghost whose head is smoke?

  Her thighs hold the wild infant, a trampled country

  and I will fly in, in all my fears.

  Those two have terrified me, but I live,

  their silvery line of music gave me girlhood

  and fierce male prowess and a woman's grave

  eternal double music male and female,

  inevitable blue, repeated evening

  of the two. Of the two.

  4

  But these two figures are not the statues east and west

  at my long window on the river they are mother and father

  but not my actual parents only their memory.

  Not memory but something builded in my cells

  Father with your feet cut off

  mother cut down to death

  cut down my sister in the selfsame way

  and my abandoned husband a madman of the sun

  and you dark outlaw the other one when do we speak

  The song flies out of all of you the song

  starts in my body, the song

  it is in my mouth, the song