[UNTITLED]
The risen image shines, its force escapes, we are all named.
Now that the threads are held; now that the footcuts hold
where these intent finders of tumult climbed
in music or mathematical intensity,
and paint, or fire, or order, found and held,
their achieved spirits gleam. In the dark perfect sky
a hand is risen firm under its crackling globe of flame.
Against the stare it floats, over our agony of street,
repeated eyes, disclosures and closures of walls,
glimpses of centuries until the shining fails.
The faces are normal; the superhuman light saves, kills, and saves;
is mixed, and they fall fighting; and wake to climb the streets
in the vigor of their blood grown changed and abstract,
whose faces begotten of faces crack in their bitterness
light through all faces with the familiar strain
of features that have earned a general grace;
in a fountain of energy shining among the graves
earned human meaning and fantastic flame—
hold pitiless under street-flares colors of night, react,
remain in a passion of daybreak effort when the day arrives.
They are real whereof the ancestors were dreams,
hallucination and loneliness and the creative yoke.
And they may break the eyes to water or ease like starlight in
tormented cities whose shops and savage parks
are the star-chamber of a furious race,
whose warehouses, tenements, equations, song
have risen in complexity among
old portraits, flayed men, skeletons of slaves, and women
with brilliant carriage and averted face
proving a paranoiac rule tricking to death its children.
But there are more in the scheme : the many-born
charging our latest moment with their wave,
a shaking sphere whose center names us all as core,
risen among the timid and the torn
toward the sun-cities which the brain has known
whose moment of proof races through time to live.
These faces have risen, destroyed, found and still find
antagonisms of life, the dreamed and half-known world,
awakened forms among the profuse creative
promises of the mind.
GIBBS
It was much later in his life he rose
in the professors' room, the frail bones rising
among that fume of mathematical meaning,
symbols, the language of symbols, literature…threw
air, simple life, in the dead lungs of their meeting,
said, “Mathematics is a language.”
Withdrew. Into a silent world beyond New Haven,
the street-fights gone, the long youth of undergraduate
riots down Church Street, initiation violence,
secret societies gone : a broken-glass isolation,
bottles smashed flat, windows out, street-fronts broken :
to quiet,
the little portico, wrought-iron and shutters' house.
A usable town, a usable tradition.
In war or politics.
Not science.
Withdrew.
Civil War generates, but
Not here. Tutors Latin after his doctorate
when all of Yale is disappearing south.
There is no disorganization, for there is no passion.
Condense, he is thinking. Concentrate, restrict.
This is the state permits the whole to stand,
the whole which is simpler than any of its parts.
And the mortars fired, the tent-lines, lines of trains,
earthworks, breastworks of war, field-hospitals,
Whitman forever saying, “Identify.”
Gibbs saying
“I wish to know systems.”
To be in this work. Prepare an apocryphal
cool life in which nothing is not discovery
and all is given, levelly, after clearest
most disciplined research.
The German years
of voyage, calmer than Kant in Koenigsberg, to states
where laws are passed and truth's a daylight gift.
Return to a house inheriting Julia's keys,
sister receiving all the gifts of the world,
white papers on your desk.
Spiritual gift
she never took.
Books of discovery,
haunted by steam, ghost of the disembodied engine,
industrialists in their imperious designs
made flower an age to be driven far by this
serene impartial acumen.
Years of driving
his sister's coach in the city, knowing the
rose of direction loosing its petals down
atoms and galaxies. Diffusion's absolute.
Phases of matter! The shouldering horses pass
turnings (snow, water, steam) echoing plotted curves,
statues of diagrams, the forms of schemes
to stand white on a table, real as phase,
or as the mountainous summer curves when he
under New Hampshire lay while shouldering night
came down upon him then with all its stars.
Gearing that power-spire to the wide air.
Exacting symbols of rediscovered worlds.
Through evening New Haven drove. The yellow window
of Sloane Lab all night shone.
Shining an image whole, as a streak of brightness
bland on the quartz, light-blade on Iceland spar
doubled! and the refraction carrying fresh clews.
Withdrew.
It will be an age of experiment,
or mysticism, anyway vastest assumption.
He makes no experiments. Impregnable retires.
Anyone having these desires will make these researches.
Laws are the gifts of their systems, and the man
in constant tension of experience drives
moments of coexistence into light.
It is the constitution of matter I must touch.
Deduction from deduction : entropy,
heat flowing down a gradient of nature,
perpetual glacier driving down the side
of the known world in an equilibrium tending
to uniformity, the single dream.
He binds
himself to know the public life of systems.
Look through the wounds of law
at the composite face of the world.
If Scott had known,
he would not die at the Pole, he would have been
saved, and again saved—here, gifts from overseas,
and grapes in January past Faustus' grasp.
Austerity, continence, veracity, the full truth flowing
not out from the beginning and the base,
but from accords of components whose end is truth.
Thought resting on these laws enough becomes
an image of the world, restraint among
breaks manacles, breaks the known life before
Gibbs' pale and steady eyes.
He knew the composite
many-dimensioned spirit, the phases of its face,
found the tremendous level of the world,
Energy : Constant, but entropy, the spending,
tends toward a maximum—a “mixed-up-ness,”
and in this end of levels to which we drive
in isolation, to which all systems tend,
Withdraw, he said clearly.
The soul says to the self : I will withdraw,
the self saying to the soul : I will withdraw,
and soon they are asleep together
spiralling through one dream.
Withd
rew, but in
his eager imperfect timidities, rose and dared
sever waterspouts, bring the great changing world
time makes more random, into its unity.
RYDER
Call himself unbegun, for the sea made him; assemblages of waters
gave him his color.
But not the sea; coast-line, coast-water, rising sfumato from smoke-holes
of the sea,
pitching onto the black rock of the ocean-edge. But not the coast-line;
the Atlantic coast, flinging him headlong from its rigors into his art.
Great salt-swept boldface captain, big-boned New Englander
drowning deep
among the mysteries of the painful western adventure, circling
in unappeased circles into America.
Tempests, phantasmagoria! Impervious, first of all
to paint the tragic landscape that breeds us here,
the deep life, the terrible foreboding whose soil
is in our mind, the imagination of this geography.
Whose whaling port acknowledges the fearful
content of evil and the swift-lit blessed light,
Melville's ‘latent horror of life’ in the whale water
that Ryder, whose racecourse with its big horse Death
runs round the brain, knew.
In his room
wreckage of boxes, propped-leg, easel, couch, ashes, coal-keg, shells,
bronzed tarnished coffee-pot, books, paints, piled broken furniture,
varnish drippings, matches, cans, newspapers stacked up,
plaster falling with a scurrying like mice, paper bannering from the
walls,
the stains, the path cleared to the stuffed chair crammed with poems,
money, checks, poems, the bathtub filled with clothes—
the unseen room, after a moment there.
He stood
laying the paint on
stacking color on,
more pigment, dark and stormy, thickness, depth, more black, stove-
ashes maybe,
and at the last slashed poker through the cloth, a knife of lightning,
white as space, leaping white! out of darkness!
Out black night leaping, rider to flame.
He walks through the rainy streets, the great grey sweater;
fog walking through rain, wool worn on his giant head,
his giant beard stowed in the collar. Walks black pavement.
Is seen on corners beaten by storms of night.
He gives a painting to the tubercular seamstress
“to look at while she lives,” talks poetry
and philosophy to the woman at the newsstand.
He believes with his eye, he lives in the foreboding
empty tempests of the mind, thunder revolving
among his blackest noons; remembers voyages
to fabulous harbors whose event was sea.
He looks through the plateglass window at his formal dinner,
turns down the street, “I have been there,” looks through glass
at formal painting, inch by inch, reaching the corner
stands back, “That's a fine place.” And moves away
to mystic reconciliations, feeling the world enlarge
and never complete itself, a bone riding a horse
around a track, dead angels from the sea resurrected
to lend a metaphor of waves, to sound the abstract
Jonah who rolls under a pitch of ocean,
knows God with his arms up among the teeth of waves,
the moon stark in the sky as a center of whirlpool.
All these invoke the image, a sea-belief in the sea
whose waters open swallow the army whole and save the tribe.
He is your irresponsible pioneer. He is deprived. Fearful of sex.
Desire, God's blossoming rod
points to assemblages of waters, heroes Macbeth kneedeep,
the foggy Dutchman riding, salt eyelids see
the fall of waters, the distinction and power, the shock,
the helplessness immanent in things.
Ghosts of oxen, stiff-grappled claws of a dead bird,
romantic wish that mourns from an Opera seat
over the spotlit love, wishes housekeeper love,
Elaine of wish, bends over an empty big suit of armor,
over the giant fallen bones of the dead horse.
Historic disherison : Ryder, emblematist,
divorced from the arts, believing in art alone,
master of meaning and never mastering means,
wasteful and slow, without tradition. He shortens
the life of his paintings in their friable colors
by ignorance, by storms. Refusing the dead life
like a nest of tables whose next is always smaller
refined and congruent, slashes American sky
by derelict lightning, turning all landscape into
sublunar ocean. He is chained under water,
chained under rain, under paint, no hold on daylight,
his fixed moon stares into a tragic coast
whose people are little figures pasted on.
“Not you,” he cries, “the human document.”
These are not paintings for comfort hung on walls.
Paint over it, paint. It is a monument
cracking and supernatural, an obelisk at the sea,
three sides shadowed with names, the sea-slab empty.
A big-boned charging figure under rain
seen by the visionary moon and dark,
unbegun among assemblages of waves.
His head that was moon the center of the storm.
His boulders that were eyes washed by the drift of ocean.
CHAPMAN
Returns to punishment as we all return, in agonized initiation proving America,
a country returning to moments of conversion, in agony supporting its changes,
receiving
the past, the clews of instinct, and the rich return:
conviction in our people's face, all in pain.
He dances in Boston, the young and turning side
turned to a room of marvellous skirts whose rustle
like burning paper alters, rustling black to flame.
He looks across all rooms to a sibyl-minded woman
the dark the clew to life whose afternoons
he shares through Dante's climbing Paradise
to break his youth, the handsome turning side
dancing and turning again to her dark head
in rings of darkness whose God is ringed in light
which coils and revolves around him—
in the smoky garden
after the word was spoken
the blow to the rival's smoky head echoing in the hand
ringed round with darkness;
dark passages through streets unknown; and now, at home,
he sees his braced arm, ringing with the shock,
given before him to the ringing fire.
Blaze of hard-coal. Disapparition of flesh.
He draws his hand out of flame; charred to the bone,
white knuckles and finger-bones exposed.
His soul rises screaming in the shape of an eagle.
He says, quietly and exactly, “This will never do.”
“The one time in my life I lived was twenty days of pain.”
And later, after the healing, after the marriage,
alone among red desert, the wild bushes' grey-green,
the red buttes cancelling half the sky, he writes
“It was not waste land in Colorado. Not waste time, for
you are here and many lives packed into one life,
the green shoot out of the heart of the plant, springing up blossoms in the night;
many old things have put on immortality,
and lost things have come back knocking within<
br />
from before the time I was conceived in the womb,
there were you also.
And of the pain! it was false,
and the rending, unnecessary.
The breaking down of dams that ought never be up,
but being up it was the sweeping away
that the waters might flow together.”
The life all burning on the public hill,
the men living tramort, travelling through their deaths,
arrive with marks by which they know one another
at the center of systems. By a breach of childhood
symptoms of health declare all the signs leading through,
until the crisis comes,
air seethes, and all the bushes flicker up,
memories parasite in the life underground
irrupt with convulsions and the speech of fire.
At the focus, the cool life is insufficient.
He knows his conversion. He speaks of Whitman as tramp:
“By an act as simple as death, he puts off effort and lives in peace.”
Knowing by what redemption he claims his house,
he stands on the balcony of a burning building.
The ghosts come near the blood. Sits at the bedside reading
to the dropped quiet head, Dante and fire and coexistent death
at his wife's bedside.
Fire, rage, splendor; and terror
who judges the judgment of men.
He is broken, his face is broken back,
his spirit's legs are broken, crutches hold him,
a second wife holds him while he becomes
incredible to himself, fulgurite fused by lightning,
health shaking its flag of death in his frenetic head.
Death of his son, and he heals, he is born again,
fed on his agonies, wanting again
his gritty taste of truth.
There are those who are many-born. There is the man
who will plunge his hand in the fire this evening, who goes out every day
seeing Prometheus in mirrors, finding
comets, men of the people, conscious, who take their place
in national revulsion producing a nation's poems,
belong to the present, are not sterilized
by breaks from the past.
He fights for the acute senses, terror, passion, and need.
“I make it a policy to say nothing I will not regret.”
Speaks from a cart-end, manhandles his hecklers,
knows the struggles of treason making it easy for death
to arrive when the living have passed the perfection of youth.
The century bursts upward in shocks of flame,
fireworks' starfish of imperial spirit,
ordeals by fire : he fights the finished wars,
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 22