Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  Rousing of memory : the inquisition.

  Purgation of the future. “Cut off this lobe,” they said.

  “The heart is rejecting the present.” On the roads

  The dead of the resistance tried to stand

  Again, they tried to stand again.

  But they were dead.

  The surgeons are cutting out his words.

  Too late; all the children are silent.

  On the central plateau, snow is falling.

  Incisions split the open country. On the coast of pain,

  All craft becalmed. The surgeons are singing.

  No, of course the dragon is not dead.

  A branch of a tree is dead.

  A generation is dead.

  Most of the living are silent.

  Prepare the ink on the rollers;

  This has been a long time coming.

  The posters carry one word:

  Today!

  Send the word underground, where water flows,

  Clear, pure, black.

  Is it beyond taint?

  No, it is not beyond taint.

  Certain women and men look at us out of their eyes.

  Do they begin to speak

  They have been speaking all along.

  We can tell by their eyes,

  Although their mouths are broken.

  Now they are healing their mouths;

  They have been speaking during all this dead lifetime.

  Has the dragon died?

  Something is beginning to be born,

  But the seeds of the dragon are also growing in the fresh

  wombs of girls.

  O love. Make the song start.

  Summer 1936–Winter 1975

  MENDINGS

  for Alfred Marshak

  You made healing as you wanted us to make bread and poems.

  In your abrasive life of gifts,

  In the little ravine telling the life of the future

  When your science would be given to all,

  A broken smile.

  In the sun, speaking of the joining of nerve-endings,

  Make the wounds part of the well body.

  Make a healed life.

  You shouted, waving your hand with the last phalange

  Of the little finger missing, you whole man,

  “Make it well! Make things accessible!”

  He is a pollinating man. We are his seedlings.

  Marshak, I was your broken nerve-endings,

  You made your man-made bridges over the broken nerves.

  What did you do? Inspect potatoes, wait for passports, do your research,

  While the State Department lady was saying, “Let him swim,”

  While the chief who had the power to allow your uses

  To move, a proper use of plastic, a bridge across broken nerves

  Stopped you there (and asked me to marry him).

  Saying to you, Marshak, full of creation as the time

  Went deeper into war, and you to death:

  “The war will be over before your work is ready.”

  THEN

  When I am dead, even then,

  I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,

  When I am dead, even then

  I am still listening to you.

  I will still be making poems for you

  out of silence;

  silence will be falling into that silence,

  it is building music.

  2

  THE GATES

  Scaffolding. A poet is in solitary; the expectation is that he will be tried and summarily executed on a certain day in autumn. He has been on this cycle before : condemned to death, the sentence changed to life imprisonment, and then a pardon from his President during a time of many arrests and executions, a time of terror. The poet has written his stinging work—like that of Burns or Brecht—and it has got under the skin of the highest officials. He is Kim Chi Ha.

  An American woman is sent to make an appeal for the poet's life. She speaks to Cabinet ministers, the Cardinal, university people, writers, the poet's family and his infant son. She stands in the mud and rain at the prison gates—also the gates of perception, the gates of the body. She is before the house of the poet. He is in solitary.

  1

  Waiting to leave all day I hear the words;

  That poet in prison, that poet newly-died

  whose words we wear, reading, all of us. I and my son.

  All day we read the words:

  friends, lovers, daughters, grandson,

  and all night the distant loves

  and I who had never seen him am drawn to him

  Through acts, through poems,

  through our closenesses—

  whatever links us in our variousness;

  across worlds, love and poems and justices

  wishing to be born.

  2

  Walking the world to find the poet of these cries.

  But this walking is flying the streets of all the air.

  Walking the world, through the people at airports,

  this city of hills, this island ocean fire-blue and now this city.

  Walking this world is driving the roads of houses

  endless tiles houses, fast streams, now this child's house.

  Walking under the sharp mountains through the sharp city

  circled in time by rulers, their grip; the marvelous

  hard-gripped people silent among their rulers, looking at me.

  3 NEW FRIENDS

  The new friend comes into my hotel room

  smiling. He does a curious thing.

  He walks around the room, touching

  all the pictures hanging on the wall.

  One picture does not move.

  A new friend assures me : Foreigners are safe,

  You speak for writers, you are safe, he says.

  There will be no car

  driving up behind you, there will be

  no accident, he says. I know these accidents.

  Nothing will follow you, he says.

  O the Mafia at home, I know, Black Hand

  of childhood, the death of Tresca whom I mourn,

  the building of New York. Many I know.

  This morning I go early to see the Cardinal.

  When I return, the new friend is waiting. His face

  wax-candle-pool-color, he saying

  “I thought you were kidnapped.”

  A missionary comes to visit me.

  Looks into my eyes. Says,

  “Turn on the music so we can talk.”

  4

  The Cabinet minister speaks of liberation.

  “Do you know how the Communists use this word?”

  We all use the word. Liberation.

  No, but look—these are his diaries,

  says the Cabinet minister.

  These were found in the house of the poet.

  Look, Liberation, Liberation, he is speaking in praise.

  He says, this poet, It is not wrong

  to take from the rich and give to the poor.

  Yes. He says it in prose speech, he says it in his plays,

  he says it in his poems that bind me to him,

  that bind his people and mine in these new ways

  for the first time past strangeness and despisal.

  It also means that you broke into his house and stole his papers.

  5

  Among the days,

  among the nights of the poet in solitary,

  a strong infant is just beginning to run.

  I go up the stepping-stones

  to where the young wife of the poet

  stands holding the infant in her arms.

  She weeps, she weeps.

  But the poet's son looks at me

  and the wife's mother looks at me with a keen look

  across her grief. Lights in the house, books making every wall

  a wall of speech.

  The clasp of the woman's hand


  around my wrist, a keen band

  more steel than the words

  Save his life.

  I feel that clasp on my bones.

  A strong infant is beginning to run.

  6 THE CHURCH OF GALILEE

  As we climb to the church of Galilee

  Three harsh men on the corner.

  As we go to the worship-meeting of the dismissed,

  three state police on the street.

  As we all join at the place of the dispossessed,

  three dark men asking their rote questions.

  As we go ahead to stand with our new friends

  that will be our friends our lifetime.

  Introduced as dismissed from this faculty, this college,

  this faculty, this university.

  ‘Dismissed’ is now an honorary degree.

  The harsh police are everywhere,

  they have hunted this fellowship away before

  and they are everywhere, at the street-corner,

  listening to all hymns,

  standing before all doors,

  hearing over all wires.

  We go up to Galilee.

  Let them listen to the dispossessed

  and to all women and men who stand firm and sing

  wanting a shared and honest lifetime.

  Let them listen to Galilee.

  7 THE DREAM OF GALILEE

  That night, a flute

  across the dark, the sound

  opening times to me, a time

  when I stood on the green hillside

  before the great white stone.

  Grave of my ancestor

  Akiba at rest over Kinneret.

  The holy poem, he said to me,

  the Song of Songs always;

  and know what I know, to love

  your belief with all your life,

  and resist the Romans, as I did,

  even to the torture and beyond.

  Over Kinneret, with all of them,

  Jesus, all the Judeans,

  that other Galilee

  in dream across war I see.

  8 MOTHER AS PITCHFORK

  Woman seen as a slender instrument,

  woman at vigil in the prison-yard,

  woman seen as the fine tines of a pitchfork

  that works hard, that is worn down, rusted down

  to a fine sculpture standing in a yard

  where her son's body is confined.

  Woman as fine tines blazing against sunset,

  wavering lines against yellow brightness

  where her fine body becomes transparent in bravery,

  where she will live and die as the tines of a pitchfork

  that stands to us as her son's voice does stand

  across the world speaking

  The rumor comes that if this son is killed

  this mother will kill herself

  But she is here, she lives,

  the slender tines of this pitchfork standing in flames of light.

  9

  You grief woman you gave me a scarlet coverlet

  thick-sown with all the flowers

  and all the while your poet sleeps in stone

  Grief woman, the waves of this coverlet,

  roses of Asia,

  they flicker soft and bright over my sleep

  all night while the poet waits in solitary

  All you vigil women, I start up in the night,

  fling back this cover of red;

  in long despair we work write speak pray call to others

  Free our night free our lives free our poet

  10

  Air fills with fear and the kinds of fear:

  The fear of the child among the tyrannical

  unanswerable men and women, they dominate day and night.

  Fear of the young lover in the huge rejection

  ambush of sex and of imagination;

  fear that the world will not allow your work.

  Fear of the overarching wars and poverties,

  the terrible exiles,

  all bound by corruption until at last! we speak!

  And those at home in jail who protest the frightful war

  and the beginning : The woman-guard says to me, Spread your cheeks,

  the search begins and I begin to know.

  And also at home the nameless multitude

  of fears : fear in childbirth for the living child,

  fear for the child deformed and loved, fear

  among the surgeries that can cure her, fear

  for the child's father, and for oneself, fear.

  Fear of the cunt and cock in their terrible powers

  and here a world away fear of the jailers' tortures

  for we invent our fear and act it out

  in ripping, in burning, in blood, in the terrible scream

  and in tearing away every mouth that screams.

  Giant fears : massacres, the butchered that across the fields of the world

  lie screaming, and their screams are heard as silence.

  O love, knowing your love across a world of fear,

  I lie in a strange country, in pale yellow, swamp-green, woods

  and a night of music while a poet lies in solitary

  somewhere in a concrete cell. Glare-lit, I hear,

  without books, without pen and paper.

  Does he draw a pencil out of his throat,

  out of his veins, out of his sex?

  There are cells all around him, emptied.

  He can signal on these walls till he runs mad.

  He is signalling to me across the night.

  He is signalling. Many of us speak,

  we do teach each other, we do act through our fears.

  Where is the world that will touch life to this prison?

  We run through the night. We are given his gifts.

  11

  Long ago, soon after my son's birth

  —this scene comes in arousal with the sight of a strong child

  just beginning to run—

  when all life seemed prisoned off, because the father's other son

  born three weeks before my child

  had opened the world

  that other son and his father closed the world—

  in my fierce loneliness and fine well-being

  torn apart but with my amazing child

  I celebrated and grieved.

  And before that baby

  had ever started to begin to run

  then Mary said,

  smiling and looking out of her Irish eyes,

  “Never mind, Muriel.

  Life will come will come again

  knocking and coughing and farting at your door.”

  12

  For that I cannot name the names,

  my child's own father, the flashing, the horseman,

  the son of the poet—

  for that he never told me another child was started,

  to come to birth three weeks before my own.

  Tragic timing that sets the hands of time.

  O wind from our own coast, turning

  around the turning world.

  Wind from the continents, this other child,

  child of this moment and this moment's poet.

  Again I am struck nameless, unable to name,

  and the axe-blows fall heavy heavy and sharp

  and the moon strikes his white light down over the continents

  on this strong infant and the heroic friends

  silent in this terrifying moment under all moonlight,

  all sunlight turning in all our unfree lands.

  Name them, name them all, light of our own time.

  13

  Crucified child—is he crucified? he is tortured,

  kept away from his father, spiked on time,

  crucified we say, cut off from the man

  they want to kill—

  he runs toward me in Asia, crying.

  Flash gives me my own son st
rong and those years ago

  cut off from his own father and running toward me

  holding a strong flower.

  Child of this moment, you are your father's child

  wherever your father is prisoned, by what tyrannies

  or jailed as my child's father

  by his own fantasies—

  child of the age running among the world,

  standing among us who carry our own time.

  14

  So I became very dark very large

  a silent woman this time given to speech

  a woman of the river of that song

  and on the beach of the world in storm given

  in long lightning seeing the rhyming of those scenes

  that make our lives.

  Anne Sexton the poet saying

  ten days ago to that receptive friend,

  the friend of the hand-held camera:

  “Muriel is serene.”

  Am I that in their sight?

  Word comes today of Anne's

  of Anne's long-approaching

  of Anne's over-riding over-falling

  suicide. Speak for sing for pray for

  everyone in solitary

  every living life.

  15

  All day the rain

  all day waiting within the prison gate

  before another prison gate

  The house of the poet

  He is in there somewhere

  among the muscular wardens

  I have arrived at the house of the poet

  in the mud in the interior music of all poems

  and the grey rain of the world

  whose gates do not open.

  I stand, and for this religion and that religion

  do not eat but remember all the things I know

  and a strong infant beginning to run.

  Nothing is happening. Mud, silence, rain.

  Near the end of the day

  with the rain and the knowledge pulling at my legs

  a movement behind me makes me move aside.

  A bus full of people turns in the mud, drives to the gate.

  The gate that never opens

  opens at last. Beyond it, slender

  Chinese-red posts of the inner gates.

  The gate of the house of the poet.

  The bus is crowded, a rush-hour bus that waits.

  Nobody moves.

  “Who are these people?” I say.

  How can these gates open?

  My new friend has run up beside me.

  He has been standing guard in the far corner.

  “They are prisoners,” he says, “brought here from trial.

  Don't you see? They are all tied together.”

  Fool that I am! I had not seen the ropes,

  down at their wrists in the crowded rush-hour bus.

  The gates are open. The prisoners go in.

  The house of the poet who stays in solitary,