Or must we listen to those blistering strings?
The trial of heroes follows their execution. The striding
wind of nations with new rain, new lightning,
destroyed in magnificent noon shining straight down
the fiery pines. Brown wanted freedom. Could not himself be free
until more grace reached a corroded world. Our guilt his own.
Under the hooded century drops the trap—
There in October's fruition-fire three
tall images of him, Brown as he stood on the ground,
Brown as he stood on sudden air, Brown
standing to our fatal topmost hills
faded through dying altitudes, and low
through faces living under the dregs of the air,
deprived childhood and thwarted youth and change:
fantastic sweetness gone to rags
and incorruptible anger blurred by age.
Compel the steps of lovers, watch them lie silvery
attractive in naked embrace over the brilliant gorge,
and open them to love: enlarge their welcome
to sharp-faced countrysides, vicious familiar windows
whose lopped-off worlds say I am promise, holding
stopgap slogans of a thin season's offering,
false initials, blind address, dummy name—
enemies who reply in smiles; mild slavers; moderate whores.
There is another gorge to remember, where soldiers give
terrible answers of lechery after death.
Brown said at last, with a living look,
“I designed to have done the same thing
again on a larger scale.” Brown sees his tree
grow in the land to leap these mountains.
Not mountains, but men and women sleeping.
O my scene! My mother!
America who offers many births.
Over the tier of barriers, compel the connected steps
past the attacks of sympathy, past black capitals,
to arrive with horizon sharpness, marching
in quick embrace toward people
faltering among hills among the symptoms of ice,
small lights of the shifting winter, the rapid snow-blue stars.
This must be done by armies. Nothing is free.
Brown refuses to speak direct again,
“If I tell them the truth,
they will say I speak in symbols.”
White landscapes emphasize his nakedness
reflected in counties of naked who shiver at fires,
their backs to the hands that unroll worlds around them.
They go down the valleys. They shamble in the streets,
Blind to the sun-storming image in their eyes.
They dread the surface of their victim life,
lying helpless and savage in shade parks,
asking the towers only what beggars dare:
food, fire, water, and air.
Spring: the great hieroglyph : the mighty, whose first hour
collects the winter invalids, whose cloudless
pastures train swarms of mutable apple-trees
to blond delusions of light, the touch of whiter
more memorable breasts each evening, the resistant
male shoulders riding under sold terrible eyes.
The soldier-face persists, the victorious head
asks, kissing those breasts, more miracles—
Untarnished hair! Set them free! “Without the snap of a gun—”
More failures—but the season is a garden after sickness;
Then the song begins,
“The clearing of the sky
brings fulness to heroes—
Call Death out of the city
and ring the summer in.”
Whether they sleep alone. Whether they understand darkness
of mine or tunnel or store. Whether they lay branches
with skill to entice their visions out of fire.
Whether she lie awake, whether he walk in guilt
down padded corridors, leaving no fingerprints.
Whether he weaken searching for power in papers,
or shut out every fantasy but the fragile eyelid to
commemorate delight…
They believe in their dreams.
They more and more, secretly, tell their dreams.
They listen oftener for certain words, look deeper
in faces for features of one remembered image.
They almost forget the face. They cannot miss the look.
It waits until faces have gathered darkness,
and country guitars a wide and subtle music.
It rouses love. It has mastered its origin:
Death was its method. It will surpass its
furious birth when it is known again.
Dreaming Ezekiel, threaten me alive!
Greengrown with sun on it. All the living summer.
They tell their dreams on the cool hill reclining
after a twilight daytime painting machines on the sky,
the spite of tractors and the toothless cannon.
Slaves under factories deal out identical
gestures of reaching—cathedral-color-rose
resumes the bricks as the brick walls lean
away from the windows, blank in bellwavering air,
a slave's mechanical cat's-claw reaping sky.
The cities of horror are down. These are called born,
and Hungry Hill is a farm again.
I know your face, deepdrowned
prophet, and seablown eyes.
Darkflowing peoples. A tall tree, prophet, fallen,
your arms in their flesh laid on the mountains, all
your branches in the scattered valleys down.
Your boughs lie broken in channels of the land,
dim anniversaries written on many clouds.
There is no partial help. Lost in the face of a child,
lost in the factory repetitions, lost
on the steel plateaus, in a ghost distorted.
Calling More Life. In all the harm calling.
Pointing disaster of death and lifting up the bone,
heroic drug and the intoxication gone.
I see your mouth calling
before the words arrive.
Buzz of guitars repeat it in streamy
summernoon song, the whitelight of the meaning
changed to demand. More life, challenging
this hatred, this Hallelloo—risk it upon yourselves.
Free all the dangers of promise, clear the image
of freedom for the body of the world.
After the tree is fallen and has become the land,
when the hand in the earth declined rises and touches and
after the walls go down and all the faces turn,
the diamond shoals of eyes demanding life
deep in the prophet eyes, a wish to be again
threatened alive, in agonies of decision
part of our nation of our fanatic sun.
The Green Wave
1948
Let poems and bodies love and be given to air,
Earth having us real in her seasons, our fire and savor;
And, reader, love well, imagine forward, for
All of the testaments are in your favor.
WATER NIGHT
The sky behind the farthest shore
Is darker than I go to sleep.
Blackness of water, the crater at the core,
The many blacknesses begin to gleam.
Rivers of darkness bind me to this land
While overhead the moon goes far to shine,
And now nothing nobody is my own.
The motion of streams glitters before my eyes:
Sources and entrances, they lie no more,
Now darkly keep, now flow now bright
Until all wandering end, a hand
Shine, and
the leadings homeward of delight
Seem to begin my deepest sleep
To make a lake of dream.
EYES OF NIGHT-TIME
On the roads at night I saw the glitter of eyes:
my dark around me let shine one ray; that black
allowed their eyes : spangles in the cat's, air in the moth's
eye shine,
mosaic of the fly, ruby-eyed beetle, the eyes that never weep,
the horned toad sitting and its tear of blood,
fighters and prisoners in the forest, people
aware in this almost total dark, with the difference,
the one broad fact of light.
Eyes on the road at night, sides of a road like rhyme;
the floor of the illumined shadow sea
and shallows with their assembling flash and show
of sight, root, holdfast, eyes of the brittle stars.
And your eyes in the shadowy red room,
scent of the forest entering, various time
calling and the light of wood along the ceiling
and over us birds calling and their circuit eyes.
And in our bodies the eyes of the dead and the living
giving us gifts at hand, the glitter of all their eyes.
THIS PLACE IN THE WAYS
Having come to this place
I set out once again
on the dark and marvelous way
from where I began:
belief in the love of the world,
woman, spirit, and man.
Having failed in all things
I enter a new age
seeing the old ways as toys,
the houses of a stage
painted and long forgot;
and I find love and rage.
Rage for the world as it is
but for what it may be
more love now than last year
and always less self-pity
since I know in a clearer light
the strength of the mystery.
And at this place in the ways
I wait for song.
My poem-hand still, on the paper,
all night long.
Poems in throat and hand, asleep,
and my storm beating strong!
SONG, FROM “MR. AMAZEEN ON THE RIVER”
Over the water, where I lie alive,
Grass burns green where the buried are,
Tall stone is standing “And the sea
Gave up its dead.” The wave, the living star,
Evening and house at river-mouth shine.
The hour of voices on the water and oars
Speaking of blue, speaking of time.
His colors, colors of deepness will arrive,
Island-sleep, keel-sleep, cloud-controlling evening.
They say to me at last “I am your home.”
CLOUDS, AIRS, CARRIED ME AWAY
Clouds, airs, carried me away,
but here we stand
and newborn we begin.
Having seen all the people of the play,
the lights, the map in the hand,
we know there will be wars
all acted out, and know not who may win.
Deep now in your great eyes, and in my gross
flesh—heavy as ever, woman of mud—
shine sunset, sunrise and the advancing stars.
But past all loss
and all forbidding a thing is understood.
Orpheus in hell remembered rivers
and a music rose
full of all human voices;
all words you wish are in that living sound.
And even torn to pieces
one piece sang
Come all ye torn and wounded here
together
and one sang to its brother
remembering.
One piece in tatters sang among its blood:
man is a weapon, woman's a trap;
and so is the hand with the map, my dear,
so is the hand with the colored map.
And I to myself the tightest trap.
Now all is young again:
in a wet night among the household music,
the new time,
by miracle my traps are sprung.
I wished you all your good again
and all your good is here with you,
smiling, various, and true,
your living friends, as live as we.
I believed because I saw not;
now I see,
with love become
so haunted by a living face
that all the dead rise up and stare;
and the dumb time, the year that was
passes away. Memory is reborn,
form and forgiveness shine.
So in this brilliant dark, dark of the year,
shining is born.
We know what we do,
and turn, and act in hope.
Now the wounds of time
have healed and are grown.
They are not wounds, they are mine,
they are healed into mouths.
They speak past wrongs. I am born;
you bring shining, and births.
Here are the stories they tell you,
here are their songs.
SALAMANDER
Red leaf. And beside it, a red leaf alive
flickers, the eyes set wide in the leaf head,
small broad chest, a little taper of flame for tail
moving a little among the leaves like fear.
Flickering red in the wet week of rain
while a bird falls safely through his mile of air.
HIS HEAD IS FULL OF FACES
for Bernard Perlin
Now he has become one who upon that coast
landed by night and found the starving army.
Fed on their cheese and wine. In those ravines
hidden by orphaned furious children lay
while cries and wounds and hour past hour of war
flamed past the broken pillars of that sky.
He saw the enemy. His head is full of faces—
the living, the brave, a pure blazing alone
to fight a domination to the end.
And now he sees the rigid terrible friend
inert, peopled by armies, winning. Now
he has become one given his life by those
fighting in Greece forever under a star
and now he knows how many wars there are.
MRS. WALPURGA
In wet green midspring, midnight and the wind
floodladen and ground-wet, and the immense dry moon.
Mrs. Walpurga under neon saw
the fluid airs stream over fluid evening,
ground, memory, give way and rivers run
into her sticky obsessive kiss of branches,
kiss of a real and visionary mouth,
the moon, the mountain, the round breast's sleepless eye.
Shapes of her fantasy in music from the bars,
swarming like juke-box lights the avenues;
no longer parked in the forest, from these cars,
these velvet rooms and wooden tourist camps,
sheetless under the naked white of the moon.
Wet gaze of eye, plum-color shadow and young
streams of these mouths, the streaming surface of earth
flowing alive with water, the egg and its becoming.
Coming in silence. The shapes of every dread
seducing the isolated will. They do not care.
They are not tortured, not tired, not alone.
They break to an arm, a leg, half of a mouth,
kissing disintegrate, flow whole, couple again;
she is changed along, she is a stream in a stream.
These are her endless years, woman and child, in dream
molded and wet, a bowl growing on a wheel,
not mud, not bowl, not clay, but this becoming,
> winter and split of darkness, years of wish.
To want these couples, want these coupling pairs,
emblems of many parents, of the bed,
of love divided by dream, love with his dead wife,
love with her husband dead, love with his living love.
Mrs. Walpurga cries out : “It is not true!”
The light shifts, flowing away. “It was never like—”
She stops, but nothing stops. It moves. It moves.
And not like anything. And it is true.
The shapes disfigure. Here is the feature man,
not whole, he is detail, he gleams and goes.
Here is the woman all cloth, black velvet face,
black, head to ground, close black fit to the skin,
slashed at the mouth and eyes, slashed at the breasts,
slashed at the triangle, showing rose everywhere.
Nights are disturbed, here is a crying river
running through years, here is the flight among
all the Objects of Love. This wish, this gesture
irresisted, immortal seduction! The young sea
streams over the land of dream, and there
the mountain like a mist-flower, the dark upright peak.
And over the sheet-flood Mrs. Walpurga
in whitened cycles of her changing moon.
The silence and the music change; this song
rises and sharps, and never quite can scream—
but this is laughter harsher than nakedness
can take—in the shady shady grove the leaves
move over, the men and women move and part,
the river braids and unfolds in mingling song;
and here is the rain of summer from the moon,
relenting, wet, and giving life at last,
and Mrs. Walpurga and we may wake.
A CERTAIN MUSIC
Never to hear, I know in myself complete
that naked integrated music; now
it has become me, now it is nerve, song, gut,
and my gross hand writes only through Mozart; see
even in withholding what you have brought to me.
Renewed, foolish, reconciled to myself, I walk
this winter-country, I fly over its still-flock'd clouds,
always in my isolated flesh I take
that theme's light certainty of absolute purpose
to make quick spirit when spirit most might break.
Naked you walked through my body and I turned
to you with this far music you now withhold.
O my destroyed hope! Though I never again
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 28