Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

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Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 28

by Janet Kaufman


  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

 

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