a minute of blindness. These colors are deeper;
the entire range in its millions,
twisting and brilliant traveling.
3
I stand in the strong sun before a bank of prisms.
On the screen in front of me, tangled colors of light,
twined, intertwined.
A sensitive web of light changing, for the sun moves, the air moves.
The perceiver moves.
I dance my slow dance.
4
The deepest blue, green, not the streams of the sea,
the clear yellow of yellows, not California, more,
not Mediterranean, not the Judean steeps. Red beyond
blood over flame,
more even than visionary America. All light.
A man braced on the sun, where the sun enters
through the roof, where the sun-follower,
a man-made motor with a gentle motion
just counters the movement of the earth, holds this scene
in front of us on the man-made screen.
Light traveling, meets, leaps and becomes art.
5
Colors move on a screen. The doors open again.
They run in, the California children.
They run past the colors and the colors change.
The laughter of running. They cry out, bird-voices,
ninety-seven children, Wow! Wow! How come?
6
Another day. I stand before the screen,
Alone I move, selecting out my green,
choose out the red with my arm, I let the orange stand,
a web of yellow, the blue stays and shines.
I am part of the color, I am part of the sun.
7
You have made an art in which the sun is standing.
It changes, goes dark, goes grey. The sun appears.
You have led me through eleven states of being.
You have invited us all. Allow the sunlight,
dance your dance.
8
Another day. No sun. The fog is down,
Doing its slow dance into the city,
It enters the Gate and my waking.
There will be no colors but the range of white.
Before the screen, I wait.
9
Night. What do you know about the light?
10
Waiting. A good deal like real life.
Waiting before the sea for the fish to run
Waiting before the paper for the poem
Waiting for a man's life to be, to be.
11
Break of light! Sun in his colors,
streaming into our lives.
This artist dreams of the sun, the sun, the children of the sun.
12
Frail it is and can be intercepted.
Fragile, like ourselves. Mirrors and prisms, they
can be broken.
Children shattered by anything.
Strong, pouring strong, wild as the power of the great sun.
Not art, but light. In distance, in smiting winter,
the artist speaks : No art.
This is not art.
What is an artist? I bear the song of the sun.
POEM WHITE PAGE WHITE PAGE POEM
Poem white page white page poem
something is streaming out of a body in waves
something is beginning from the fingertips
they are starting to declare for my whole life
all the despair and the making music
something like wave after wave
that breaks on a beach
something like bringing the entire life
to this moment
the small waves bringing themselves to white paper
something like light stands up and is alive
FABLE
for Herbert Kohl
Yes it was the prince's kiss.
But the way was prepared for the prince.
It had to be.
When the attendants carrying the woman
—dead they thought her lying on the litter—
stumbled over the root of a tree
the bit of deathly apple in her throat
jolted free.
Not strangled, not poisoned!
She
can come alive.
It was an “accident” they hardly noticed.
The threshold here comes when they stumble.
The jolt. And better if we notice,
However, their noticing is not
Essential to the story.
A miracle has even deeper roots,
Something like error, some profound defeat.
Stumbled-over, the startle, the arousal,
Something never perceived till now, the taproot.
NERUDA, THE WINE
We are the seas through whom the great fish passed
And passes. He died in a moment of general dying.
Something was reborn. What was it, Pablo?
Something is being reborn : poems, death, ourselves,
The link deep in our peoples, the dead link in our dead regimes,
The last of our encounters transformed from the first
Long ago in Xavier's house, where you lay sick,
Speaking of poems, the sheet pushed away
Growth of beard pressing up, fierce grass, as you spoke.
And that last moment in the hall of students,
Speaking at last of Spain, that core of all our lives,
The long defeat that brings us what we know.
Meaning, poems, lifelong in loss and presence passing forever.
I spilled the wine at the table
And you, Pablo, dipped your finger in it and marked my forehead.
Words, blood, rivers, cities, days. I go, a woman signed by you—
The poems of the wine.
BEFORE DANGER
There were poems all over Broadway that morning.
Blowing across traffic. Against the legs.
Held for a moment on the backs of hands.
Drifts of poems in doorways.
The crowd was a river to the highest tower
all the way down that avenue.
Snow on that river, torn paper
of their faces.
Late at night, in a dark-blue sleep,
the paper stopped blowing.
Lightning struck at me from behind my eyes.
SONG : REMEMBERING MOVIES
remembering movies love
remembering songs
remembering the scenes and flashes of your life
given to me as we lay dreaming
giving dreams
in the sharp flashes of light
raining from the scenes of your life
the faithless stories, adventures, discovery
sexuality opening range after range
and the sharp music driven forever into my life
I sing the movies of your life
the sequences cut in rhythms of collision
rhythms of linkage, love,
I sing the songs
WORK, FOR THE DAY IS COMING
It is the poem, yes
that it exist that it grow in reach
that it grow into lives not yet born not yet speaking.
That its sounds move with the grace of meaning
the liquid sharing, the abrupt clash of lives.
That its suggestions climb to
descend to the fire of finding
the last breath of the poem
and further.
For that I move through states of being,
the struggle to wake, the frightful morning,
the flash of ecstasy among our mutilations,
the recognizing light shining and all night long
am invited led whipped dragged through states of being
toward the
inviting you through states of being
poem.
&nb
sp; RECOVERING
Dream of the world
speaking to me.
The dream of the dead
acted out in me.
The fathers shouting
across their blue gulf.
A storm in each word,
an incomplete universe.
Lightning in brain,
slow-time recovery.
In the light of October
things emerge clear.
The force of looking
returns to my eyes.
Darkness arrives
splitting the mind open.
Something again
is beginning to be born.
A dance is
dancing me.
I wake in the dark.
PARALLEL INVENTION
We in our season like progress and inventions.
The inventor is really the invention.
But who made the inventions? To what uses
Were they put, by whom, and for what purposes?
You made an innovation and then
did you give it to me without writing it down?
Did you give it to her, too?
Did I develop it and give it to him,
or to her, or to them?
Did you quicken communication,
Did you central-control? And war? And the soul?
Let's not talk about communication
any more.
Did we deepen our integration ties
did we subsequently grow—
in strength? in complexity?
Or did we think of doing the same things
at the same time and do them to each other?
And then out of our lovemaking
emergence of priests and kings,
out of our smiles and twists
full-time craft specialists,
out of our mouths and asses
division into social classes,
art and architecture and writing
from meditation and delighting
from our terrors and our pities
“of course,” you say, “the growth of cities.”
But parallels do not imply
identities—there is no iron law;
we are richly variable
levels of heaven and levels of hell;
ripples of change out from the center
of me, of you, of love the inventor.
POEM
Green going through the jungle of those years
I see the brilliant bodies of the invaders
And the birds cry in the high trees, the sky
Flashes above me in bright crevices; time is,
And I go on and the birds fly blurred
And I pass, my eyes seeing through corpses of dead cells
Glassy, a world hardening with my hardening eyes
My look is through the corpses of all the living
Men and women who stood with me and died before
But my young look still blazes from my changing
Eyes and the jungle asserts fiery green
Even though the trees are the trees of home
And we look out of eyes filled with dead cells
See through these hours, faces of what we are.
NOT TO BE PRINTED, NOT TO BE SAID, NOT TO BE THOUGHT
I'd rather be Muriel
than be dead and be Ariel.
BACK TOOTH
My large back tooth, without a mate for years,
at last has been given one. The dentist ground her down
a bit. She had been growing wild, nothing to meet her, keep her sane.
Now she fits the new one, they work together, sleep together,
she is a little diminished but functioning, all night all day.
DESTRUCTION OF GRIEF
Today I asked Aileen
at the Film Library to help me find
those girl twins of the long-gone summer.
Aileen, who were they?
I was seven, the lion circus
was pitched in the field of sand and swordgrass
near the ocean, behind the Tackapoosha Garage.
The ancient land of the Waramaug Indians.
Now there's a summer hotel.
The first day of that circus dazzles me forever.
I stayed. That evening
the police came looking for me.
Easy to find, behind
the bales of hay, with Caesar's tamer,
the clowns, and the girl twins.
My father and mother forgave me, for they loved
circuses, opera, carnivals, New York, popular songs.
All day that summer, all July and August,
I stayed behind the tents with the twin girls,
with Caesar the lion my friend,
with the lion-tamer.
Do you know their names, Aileen?
The girls went into the early movies.
Late August, Caesar mauled the man's right hand.
I want to remember the names of those twins.
You could see he would not ever keep his hand.
Smell of the ocean, straw,
lordly animal rankness, gunpowder.
“Yes, they destroyed Caesar,” I was told that night.
Those twins became movie stars.
Those of us who were there that summer—
Joey killed himself, I saw Tommy
just before the war; is Henry around?
Helene is in real estate—and the twins—
can you tell me their names, Aileen?
TRINITY CHURCHYARD
for my mother & her ancestor, Akiba
Wherever I walked I went green among young growing
Along the same song, Mother, even along this grass
Where, Mother, tombstones stand each in its pail of shade
In Trinity yard where you at lunchtime came
As a young workingwoman, Mother, bunches of your days, grapes
Pressing your life into mine, Mother,
And I never cared for these tombs and graves
But they are your book-keeper hours.
You said to me summers later, deep in your shiniest car
As a different woman, Mother, and I your poem-making daughter—
“Each evening after I worked all day for the lock-people
“I wished under a green sky on the young evening star—
“What did I wish for?” What did you wish for, Mother?
“I wished for a man, of course, anywhere in my world,
“And there was Trinity graveyard and the tall New York steeples.”
Wherever I go, Mother, I stay away from graves
But they turn everywhere in the turning world; now,
Mother Rachel's, on the road from Jerusalem.
And mine is somewhere turning unprepared
In the earth or among the whirling air.
My workingwoman mother is saying to me, Girl—
Years before her rich needy unreal years—
Whatever work you do, always make sure
You can go walking, not like me, shut in your hours.
Mother I walk, going even here in green Galilee
Where our ancestor, Akiba, resisted Rome,
Singing forever for the Song of Songs
Even in torture knowing. Mother, I walk, this blue,
The Sea, Mother, this hillside, to his great white stone.
And again here in New York later I come alone
To you, Mother, I walk, making our poems.
BURNISHING, OAKLAND
Near the waterfront
mouth of a wide shed open
many-shining bronze flat
ship-propellors hanging in air
propellors lying blunt on ground
The vast sound and shine
screaming its word
One man masked
holding a heavy weight
on the end of a weighted boom
counterbalanced
I see him draw
his burnisher
along the bronze
high scream of burnishing
a path of brightness
Outside, the prowl cars
Oakland police
cruising past
behind them the trailing
Panther cars
to witness to
any encounter
Statement of light
I see as we drive past
act of light
among sleeping houses
in our need
the dark people
Behind my head
the shoulders of hills
and the dark houses.
Here the shine, the singing cry
near the extreme
of the range of knowing
one masked man
working alone
burnishing
THE IRIS-EATERS
for John Cage
It was like everything else, like everything—
nothing at all like what they say it is.
The petals of iris were slightly cinnamon,
a smooth beard in the mouth
transforming to strong drink,
light violet turning purple in the throat
and flashed and went deep red
burning and burning.
Well, no, more an extreme warmth,
but we thought of burning,
we thought of poisons,
we thought of the closing of the throat
forever, of dying, of the end of song.
We were doing it, you understand,
for the first time.
You were the only one of us who knew
and you saved us, John,
with music, with a
complex
smile.
SLOW DEATH OF THE DRAGON
The sickness poured through the roads,
The vineyards shook.
A clot formed on the wild river.
The streets and squares were full of crevices.
Poison ran on the church-towers.
The olive trees!
He shook for thirty years,
Held his buttocks tense while his varnished officers
Broke thighs, broke fingers.
A man dies.
The genitals of the South are broken.
Venom pours
Into his provinces of pain.
The surgeons come.
Are there children left alive
Among his bones? The drugs of choice are used,
Sleep-poison, torture-dream-drink, elixir of silence,
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 53
