Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  My sleep opens upon your face to kiss and find

  And take diversion of the meeting waters,

  The flameless sky of peace, blue-sided white air.

  I leave you as the trivial birds careen

  In separation, a dream of easy parting.

  I see you through a door. The door sails away,

  And all the ships move into the real sea.

  Let that far day arrive, that evening stain!

  Down the alleys of the night I trail a cloak;

  Field-dusk and mountain-dusk and final darkness—

  Each absence brings me nearer to that night

  When I stone-still in desire standing

  Shall see the masked body of love enter the garden

  To reach the night-burning, the perpetual fountain.

  And all the birds fly out of my scene.

  THE KEY

  I hold a key in my hand

  And it is cold, cold;

  The sign of a lost house

  That framed a symbolic face.

  Its windows now are black,

  Its walls are blank remorse,

  Here is a brass key

  Freezing to the touch.

  Of that house I say here

  Goodness came through its door,

  There every name was known,

  And of all its faces

  Unaligned beauty gives

  Me one forever

  That made itself most dear

  By killing the cruelest bond:

  Father murder and mother fear.

  What perception in that face

  Nothing but loneliness

  Can ever again retrace—

  Conflict and isolation,

  A man among copper rocks,

  Human among inhuman

  Formal immune and cold,

  Or a wonderful young woman

  In the world of the old.

  I walk the world with these:

  A wish for quick speech

  Of heathen storm-beaten poems

  In pure-lined English sound,

  A key in my hand that freezes

  Like memories of faces

  Whose intellectual color

  Relieves their cruelty,

  Until the wishes be found

  And the symbols of worship speak,

  And all may in peace, in peace,

  Guiltless turn to that mouth.

  DARKNESS MUSIC

  The days grow and the stars cross over

  And my wild bed turns slowly among the stars.

  SONG

  The world is full of loss; bring, wind, my love,

  My home is where we make our meeting-place,

  And love whatever I shall touch and read

  Within that face.

  Lift, wind, my exile from my eyes;

  Peace to look, life to listen and confess,

  Freedom to find to find to find

  That nakedness.

  SHOOTING GALLERY

  For Donald B. Elder

  These images will parade until the morning

  When every symptom is a sign of health.

  Man in repose is armed to kill, his sign

  The bomber diving down the iron funnel—

  Until he is free and the screaming of the boy

  Becomes no more than a knitting of the brows.

  But now they parade in the city and the cloud.

  Or, Don, your gallery, where all images

  Pass as a line of targets and the bells

  Ring for perfection and the birds go down,

  With one dark figure always aiming where

  Any right-minded fool sees only air.

  If anyone call it supernatural,

  Say that all shapes seduce: this space is real,

  Say that his trigger-finger can contrive

  The Middle West be Spain, the hostile child

  At last be reconciled; until this death

  Through skill dissolve in the body with all myth.

  Monsters of understanding will deny

  The body holds all images, but myth

  Is in this shape, shape of a target space

  That can be filled by the flicker of a face

  Until the parade dissolve to peace, the eye

  Of the sacred hunter assume his own identity.

  SUICIDE BLUES

  I want to speak in my voice!

  I want to speak in my real voice!

  This street leads into the white wind

  I am not yet ready to go there.

  Not in my real voice.

  The river. Do you know where the river springs?

  The river issues from a tall man,

  From his real voice.

  Do you know where the river is flowing?

  The river flows into a singing woman,

  In her real voice.

  Are you able to imagine truth?

  Evil has conspired a world of death,

  An unreal voice.

  The death-world killed me when the flowers shine,

  In spring, in front of the little children,

  It threw me burning out of the window

  And all my enemies phoned my friends,

  But my legs went running around that building

  Dancing to the suicide blues.

  They flung me into the sea

  The sunlight ran all over my face,

  The water was blue the water was dark brown

  And my severed head swam around that ship

  Three times around and it wouldn't go down.

  Too much life, my darling, embraces and strong veins,

  Every sense speaking in my real voice,

  Too many flowers, a too-knowing sun,

  Too much life to kill.

  WREATH OF WOMEN

  Raging from every quarter

  The winds attack this house

  With its great gardens

  Whose rose-established order

  Gives it its graciousness,

  Its legendary fountains

  The darkness of whose forest

  Gives it its long repose.

  Among these fountains walks

  Walpurga, goddess of springs,

  And of her summer stalks

  A gift has been given—

  Old sorrows, old beginnings,

  Matured a summer wreath.

  I offer it to you.

  There is no storm can tear

  Miracles made of grief,

  Horror, and deepest love.

  Under enchantment

  I lived a frightful summer

  Before I understood.

  It had its roots in God

  And it bred good love

  And hatred and the rare

  Revelation of fear.

  Women who in my time

  Move toward a wider giving

  Than warm kitchen offering

  And warm steady living

  Know million ignorance

  Or petty village shame,

  And come to acknowledge the world

  As a world of common blame.

  Beyond the men of letters,

  Of business and of death,

  They draw a rarer breath,

  Have no career but choice.

  Choice is their image; they

  Choose the myth they obey.

  The world of man's selection

  May widen more and more.

  Women in drudgery knew

  They must be one of four:

  Whores, artists, saints, and wives.

  There are composite lives

  That women always live

  Whose greatness is to give

  Weakness its reasons

  And strength its reassurance;

  To kiss away the waste

  Places and start them well.

  From three such women I

  Accepted gifts of life

  Grown in these gardens

  And nourished in a season

  That forced our choices on u
s

  Taking away our pardons,

  Showing us in a mirror

  Interminable girlhood

  Or the free pain and terror

  To accept and choose

  Before we could be free.

  Toward such a victory

  Crusades have moved, and peace,

  And holy stillnesses.

  These women moved alone,

  Clothed in their suffering—

  The fiery pain of children,

  The horror of the grown,

  And the pure, the intense

  Moments of music and light

  That let us live in the night

  Of the soul and the world's pain.

  O flayed Vesalian man

  Bent over your shovel,

  You will find agony

  And all the fears that rave:

  Dig in anyone's shadow,

  You find a turning grave.

  But there are victories

  That finally are given:

  A child's awareness

  Listening at a wall

  To Mozart's heaven of music

  In a forgetful town.

  The flowering wild call

  From a dark balcony

  Through fever, war and madness

  To the world's lover.

  The suffering that discovers

  Gambler and saint, and brings

  A possibility

  Wherein we breathe and live.

  These three are emblems of need:

  Now they struggle together

  In a dark forest

  Bound as a painful wreath;

  Are in that war defiled,

  Obsessive to be freed.

  Let the last meanings arrive!

  These three will be reconciled,

  Young and immortal and lovely:

  The tall and truthful child,

  The challenger's intricacies,

  Her struggles and her tenderness;

  And the pursued, who cries

  “Renunciation!” in a scarlet dress—

  Three naked women saying Yes

  Among the calling lakes, the silver trees,

  The bird-calling and the fallen grass,

  The wood-shadow and the water-shadow.

  I know your gifts, you women offering.

  Whatever attacks your lives, your images,

  And in what net of time you are trapped, or freed,

  I tell you that all of you make gifts that we

  Need in their opposition and will need

  While earth contains ambivalence.

  I praise you in the dark and intense forest,

  I will always remember you,

  Fair head, pale head, shining head;

  Your rich eyes and generous hands

  And the links underneath

  Your lives.

  Now, led

  By this unbreakable wreath

  Mrs. Walpurga moves

  Among her fountains.

  MADBOY'S SONG

  Fly down, Death: Call me:

  I have become a lost name.

  One I loved, she put me away,

  Fly down, Death;

  Myself renounced myself that day,

  Fly down, Death.

  My eyes in whom she looked so deep

  Long ago flowed away,

  My hands which slept on her asleep

  Withered away,

  My living voice I meant to keep,

  Faded and gray.

  Fly down, Death: Call me:

  I have become a lost name.

  Evening closes in whispers,

  Dark words buried in flame—

  My love, my mother, my sister,

  I know there is no blame,

  But you have your living voice,

  Speak my forgotten name.

  Fly down, Death: Call me:

  I have become a lost name.

  Don't come for me in a car

  To drive me through the town;

  Don't rise up out of the water,

  Once is enough to drown;

  Only drop out of the sky,

  For I am fallen down.

  Fly down Death.

  DRUNKEN GIRL

  Do you know the name of the average animal?

  Not the dog,

  Nor the green-beaded frog,

  Nor the white ocean monster lying flat—

  Lower than that.

  The curling one who comes out in the storm—

  The middle one's the worm.

  Lift up your face, my love, lift up your mouth,

  Kiss me and come to bed

  And do not bow your head

  Longer on what is bad or what is good—

  The dead are terribly misunderstood,

  And sin and godhead are in the worm's blind eye,

  We'll come to averages by and by.

  LOVE AND ITS DOORS AND WINDOWS

  History melts my houses,

  But they were all one house

  Where in the dark beginning

  A tall and maniac nurse

  Hid tortures behind the door

  And afterwards kissed me

  Promising all as before.

  The second house was music;

  The childish hands of fear

  Lying on a piano

  That was blackness and light,

  Opened my life with sound—

  Extorting promises

  Loud in the ringing air.

  After that, broken houses,

  The wealthy halls of cloud

  Haunted by living parents

  And the possessive face.

  Power and outrage looking

  At the great river

  Marvellous filthy and gold.

  When love lay in my arms

  I all night kissed that mouth,

  And the incredible body

  Slept warm at my side;

  But the walls fell apart

  Among my lifetime dream—

  O, a voice said crying,

  My mother's broken heart.

  Nothing was true in the sense

  I wanted it to be true.

  Victory came late,

  Excitement returned too soon.

  If my love were for the dead,

  Desire would restore

  Me to my life again.

  My love is for the living;

  They point me down to death,

  And death I will not take.

  My promises have grown,

  My kiss was never false,

  The faint clear-colored walls

  Are not forever down.

  THE MINOTAUR

  Trapped, blinded, led; and in the end betrayed

  Daily by new betrayals as he stays

  Deep in his labyrinth, shaking and going mad.

  Betrayed. Betrayed. Raving, the beaten head

  Heavy with madness, he stands, half-dead and proud.

  No one again will ever see his pride.

  No one will find him by walking to him straight

  But must be led circuitously about,

  Calling to him and close and, losing the subtle thread,

  Lose him again; while he waits, brutalized

  By loneliness. Later, afraid

  Of his own suffering. At last, savage and made

  Ravenous, ready to prey upon the race

  If it so much as learn the clews of blood

  Into his pride his fear his glistening heart.

  Now is the patient deserted in his fright

  And love carrying salvage round the world

  Lost in a crooked city; roundabout,

  By the sea, the precipice, all the fantastic ways

  Betrayal weaves its trap; loneliness knows the thread,

  And the heart is lost, lost, trapped, blinded and led,

  Deserted at the middle of the maze.

  GIFT-POEM

  The year in its cold beginning

  Promises more than cold;

  The old contrary r
hyming

  Will never again hold—

  The great moon in its timing

  Making the empty sky

  A continent of light

  Creates fine bombing weather,

  Assures a safer flight

  For fliers, and many will die

  Who in their backwardness

  Cannot leave the ground.

  Weather is not what it was:

  The losers are not winning,

  The lost will never be found.

  The year in its cold beginning

  Finds us a good deal farther

  From our good weather

  Than we had ever dreamed.

  Darling, dead words sublimed

  May be read out loud at last:

  The legendary past

  Cannot scare us again.

  This is what I have known

  After a New Year's Eve

  Of a desperate time.

  There will be great sorrow,

  Great pain, and detailed joy,

  The gladness of flowering

  Minutes, green living leaf.

  You recommend me grief:

  There will be no more grief;

  Terrible battle that tears the world apart,

  Terrible health that takes the world to bed,

  Sickness that, broken, jets across the room

  Into the future time;

  Not the mild ways of grief,

  Mourning that feels at home.

  I see your gardens from here,

  I see on your terraces

  The shadowy awful regiment;

  The weak man, the impossible man,

  The curly-headed impotent

  Whose failure did not reach his face,

  And then the struggle for grace, and then

  The school'd attenuated men.

  I know you are moved by these:

  The vice of self-desire

  That does not lead to crime,

  Leads to no action, is rather

  Liquid seductive fire

  Before the final blame

  When there is no forgiveness.

  And many lovers fail to love,

  Lose the ability to move

  Before the supernatural fear

  Calls to the natural need

  Come to the feast and feed

  On a supernatural meal:

  The taproot and the sacrifice.

  Nothing can arrive to heal

  The dead wish, the living face

  That sees its disgrace and loss,

  But the loss of its dear wish:

  The word spoken across

  Distance and loneliness—

  Communication to the flesh.

  There will be small joy:

  There will be great rage,

  Do not tell me the feeble

  Grief of the very weak;

  Only turn, only speak.

  I see all the possible ends.