Are there songs rising from the broken sources?
The mountain the bright cloud and the cities risen.
The faceless and the unborn in their transfigured song.
The god a god because there are birth and death
approaching each other in their blood and fragments,
the death and birth at last identified.
He has died the birth of the god.
The animal and song beneath the skin,
seeking an exit, baited with food and wounds;
no, not an exit. What are they seeking?
Cyclic dependence the god and the miracle
needing each other, and all the wounds are mouths,
weapon to song transfigured.
Song of the air between us, of the voiceless alone,
the cloud diffusing over the island country
pulled down in the shape of a plant, shape of a brain,
collected into the ground and will of man.
Song of the dam destroyed over the widening river
in a triumph of hope; song of the flute in the kitchen,
a little bright water boiling on the stove.
Song. The frozen man, his axe in the sequoia;
blueberries, toyon berries, black galleries of coal,
ferocious gestures of work and the bed of the poor.
The unmade music of the power to rise,
the young and unborn, the throat and hand of song.
The body risen past its other life.
Among the acts and the memories he remembers—
he brings together and he binds—
among the firewind and the cloud chamber,
he is aware, he knows the nature of power,
the nature of music and the nature of love.
Knowing the enemies, those who, deprived at the root,
flourish in thorny action, having lost the power
to act essentially, they fall into the sin
of all the powerless. They commit their acts of evil
in order to repent, repent and forgive, murder and begin again.
To have gone through.
To live and begin again.
The body alive and offering,
whole, up and alive,
and to all men, man and woman,
and to all the unborn,
the mouth shall sing
music past wounding
and the song begin:
SONG
Voices and days, the exile of our music
and the dividing airs are gathered home.
The hour of light and birth at last appears
among the alone, in prisons of scattering.
Seeming of promise, the shining of new stars,
the stars of the real over the body of love.
The cloud, the mountain, and the cities risen.
Solving the wars of the dead, and offering dream
making and morning. Days and voices, sing
creation not yet come.
Elegies
1949
FIRST ELEGY. ROTTEN LAKE
As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered
the wrecked season, haunted by plans of salvage,
snow, the closed door, footsteps and resurrections,
machinery of sorrow.
The warm grass gave to the feet and the stilltide water
was floor of evening and magnetic light and
reflection of wish, the black-haired beast with my eyes
walking beside me.
The green and yellow lights, the street of water standing
point to the image of that house whose destruction
I weep when I weep you. My door (no), poems, rest,
(don't say it!) untamable need.
When you have left the river you are a little way
nearer the lake; but I leave many times.
Parents parried my past; the present was poverty,
the future depended on my unfinished spirit.
There were no misgivings because there was no choice,
only regret for waste, and the wild knowledge:
growth and sorrow and discovery.
When you have left the river you proceed alone;
all love is likely to be illicit; and few
friends to command the soul; they are too feeble.
Rejecting the subtle and contemplative minds
as being too thin in the bone; and the gross thighs
and unevocative hands fail also. But the poet
and his wife, those who say Survive, remain;
and those two who were with me on the ship
leading me to the sum of the years, in Spain.
When you have left the river you will hear the war.
In the mountains, with tourists, in the insanest groves
the sound of kill, the precious face of peace.
And the sad frightened child, continual minor,
returns, nearer whole circle, O and nearer
all that was loved, the lake, the naked river,
what must be crossed and cut out of your heart,
what must be stood beside and straightly seen.
As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered
how the one crime is need. The man lifting the loaf
with hunger as motive can offer no alibi, is
always condemned.
These are the lines at the employment bureau
and the tense students at their examinations;
needing makes clumsy and robs them of their wish,
in one fast gesture
plants on them failure of the imagination;
and lovers who lower their bodies into the chair
gently and sternly as if the flesh had been wounded,
never can conquer.
Their need is too great, their vulnerable bodies
rigidly joined will snap, turn love away,
fear parts them, they lose their hands and voices, never
get used to the world.
Walking at night, they are asked Are you your best friend's
best friend? and must say No, not yet, they are
love's vulnerable, and they go down to Rotten Lake
hoping for wonders.
Dare it arrive, the day when weakness ends?
When the insistence is strong, the wish converted?
I prophesy the meeting by the water
of these desires.
I know what this is, I have known the waking
when every night ended in one cliff-dream
of faces drowned beneath the porous rock
brushed by the sea;
suffered the change : deprived erotic dreams
to images of that small house where peace
walked room to room and always with one face
telling her stories,
and needed that, past loss, past fever, and the
attractive enemy who in my bed
touches all night the body of my sleep,
improves my summer
with madness, impossible loss, and the dead music
of altered promise, a room torn up by the roots,
the desert that crosses from the door to the wall,
continual bleeding,
and all the time that will which cancels enmity,
seeks its own Easter, arrives at the water-barrier;
must face it now, biting the lakeside ground;
looks for its double,
the twin that must be met again, changeling need,
blazing in color somewhere, flying yellow
into the forest with its lucid edict:
take to the world,
this is the honor of your flesh, the offering
of strangers, the faces of cities, honor of all your wish.
Immortal undoing! I say in my own voice. These prophecies
may all come true,
out of the beaten season. I look in Rotten Lake
wait for the flame reflec
tion, seeing only
the free beast flickering black along my side
animal of my need,
and cry I want! I want! rising among the world
to gain my converted wish, the amazing desire
that keeps me alive, though the face be still, be still,
the slow dilated heart know nothing but lack,
now I begin again the private rising,
the ride to survival of that consuming bird
beating, up from dead lakes, ascents of fire.
SECOND ELEGY. AGE OF MAGICIANS
A baroque night advances in its clouds,
maps strain loose and are lost, the flash-flood breaks,
the lifting moonflare lights this field a moment,
while death as a skier curves along the snows,
death as an acrobat swings year to year,
turns down to us the big face of a nurse.
Roads open black, and the magicians come.
The aim of magicians is inward pleasure.
The prophet lives by faith and not by sight,
Being a visionary, he is divided,
or Cain, forever shaken by his crime.
Magnetic ecstasy, a trance of doom
mean the magician, worshipping a darkness
with gongs and lurid guns, the colors of force.
He is against the unity of light.
The Magician has his symbols, brings up his children by them:
the march-step, the staircase at night, the long cannon.
The children grow in authority and become
Molitor, Dr. Passavant, powerful Dr. Falcon,
bring their professors, and soon may govern
the zone, the zodiac, the king on his throne.
“Because the age holds its own dangers.
Because snow comes with lightnings, omens with all seasons.”
(The Prophet covers his face against the wall,
weeps, fights to think again, to plan to start
the dragon, the ecliptic, and the heart.)
The Magician lifts himself higher than the world.
The Prophets were more casual. They endured,
and in the passive dread of solitude
heard calls, followed veiled, in midnight humility.
They claimed no preference; they separated
unity from blindness
living from burning
tribute from tribute.
They have gone under, and do they come again?
The index of prophecy is light
and steeped therein
the world with all its signatures visible.
Does this life permit its living to wear strength?
Who gives it, protects it. It is food.
Who refuses it, it eats in time as food.
It is the world and it eats the world.
Who knows this, knows. This has been said.
This is the vision in the age of magicians:
it stands at immense barriers, before mountains:
‘I came to you in the form of a line of men,
and when you threw down the paper, and when you sat at the play,
and when you killed the spider, and when you saw the shadow
of the fast plane skim fast over your lover's face.
And when you saw the table of diplomats,
the newsreel of ministers, the paycut slip,
the crushed child's head, clean steel, factories,
the chessmen on the marble of the floor,
each flag a country, each chessman a live man,
one side advancing southward to the pit,
one side advancing northward to the lake,
and when you saw the tree, half bright half burning.
You never inquired into these meanings.
If you had done this, you would have been restored.’
The word is war.
And there is a prediction that you are the avenger.
They cut the people's hands, and their shoulders were left,
they cut their feet off, and their thighs were whole,
they cut them down to the torse, but the voice shouted,
they cut the head off, but the heart rang out.
And in the residential districts, where nothing ever happens,
armies of magicians filled the streets,
shouting
Need! Bread! Blood! Death!
And all this is because of you.
And all this is avenged by you.
Your index light, your voice the voice,
your tree half green and half burning,
half dead half bright,
your cairns, your beacons, your tree in green and flames,
unbending smoke in the sky, planes' noise, the darkness,
magic to fight. Much to restore, now know. Now be
Seer son of Sight, Hearer, of Ear, at last.
THIRD ELEGY. THE FEAR OF FORM
Tyranny of method! the outrageous smile
seals the museums, pours a mob skidding
up to the formal staircase, stopped, mouths open.
And do they stare? They do.
At what? A sunset?
Blackness, obscurity, bravado were the three colors;
wit-play, movement, and wartime the three moments;
formal groups, fire, facility, the three hounds.
This was their art : a wall daubed like a face,
a penis or finger dipped in a red pigment.
The sentimental frown gave them their praise,
prized the wry color, the twisted definition,
and said, “You are right to copy.”
But the car full of Communists put out hands and guns,
blew 1–2–3 on the horn before the
surrealist house, a spiral in Cataluña.
New combinations : set out materials now,
combine them again! the existence is the test.
What do you want? Lincoln blacking his lessons
in charcoal on an Indiana shovel?
or the dilettante, the impresario's beautiful skull
choosing the tulip crimson satin, the yellow satin
as the ballet dances its tenth time to the mirror?
Or the general's nephew, epaulets from birth,
run down the concourse, shouting Planes for Spain?
New methods, the staring circle given again
force, a phoenix of power, another Ancient
sits in his circle, while the plaster model
of an equation slowly rotates beneath him,
and all his golden compass leans.
Create an anti-sentimental : Sing!
“For children's art is not asylum art,
there are these formal plays in living, for
the equal triangle does not spell youth,
the cube nor age, the sphere nor ever soul.
Asylum art is never children's art.
They cut the bones down, but the line remained.
They cut the line for good, and reached the point
blazing at the bottom of its night.”
A man is walking, wearing the world, swearing
saying You damn fools come out into the open.
Whose dislocated wish? Whose terrors whine?
I'll fuse him straight.
The usable present starts my calendar.
Chorus of bootblacks, printers, collectors of shit.
Your witwork works, your artwork shatters, die.
Hammer up your abstractions. Divide, O zoo.
—He's a queer bird, a hero, a kangaroo.
What is he going to do?
He calls Rise out of cities, you memorable ghosts
scraps of an age whose choice is seen
to lie between evils. Dazzle-paint the rest,
it burns my eyes with its acetylene.
Look through the wounds, mystic and human fly,
you spiritual unicorn, you clew of eyes.
Ghosts to approach the blood in
fifteen cities.
Did you walk through the walls of the Comtesse de Noailles?
Was there a horror in Chicago?
Or ocean? Or ditches at the road. Or France,
while bearing guarding shadowing painting in Paris,
Picasso like an ass Picasso like a dragon Picasso like a
romantic movement
and immediately after, stations of swastikas
Prague and a thousand boys swing circles clean
girls by the thousand curve their arms together
geometries of wire
the barbed, starred
Heil
Will you have capitals with their tarnished countesses
their varnished cemetery life
vanished Picassos
or clean acceptable Copenhagen
or by God a pure high monument
white yellow and red
up against Minnesota?
Does the sea permit its dead to wear jewels?
Flame, fusion, defiance are your three guards,
the sphere, the circle, the cluster your three guides,
the bare, the blond and the bland are your three goads.
Adam, Godfinger, only these contacts function:
light and the high accompanied design,
contact of points the fusion say of sex
the atombuster too along these laws.
Put in a sphere, here, at the focal joint,
he said, put it in. The moment is arrangement.
Currents washed through it, spun, blew white,
fused. For! the sphere! proving!
This was the nightmare of a room alone,
the posture of grave figure, finger on other head,
he puts the finger of power on him,
optic of grandiose delusion.
All you adjacent and contagious points,
make room for fusion; fall,
you monuments, snow on your heads,
your power, your pockets, your dead parts.
Standing at midnight corners under corner-lamps
we wear the coat and the shadow of the coat.
The mind sailing over a scene lets light arrive
conspicuous sunrise, the knotted smoke rising,
the world with all its signatures visible.
Play of materials in balance,
carrying the strain of a new process.
Of the white root, the nature of the base,
contacts, making an index.
And do they stare? They do.
Our needs, our violences.
At what? Contortion of body and spirit.
To fuse it straight.
FOURTH ELEGY. THE REFUGEES
And the child sitting alone planning her hope:
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 32