Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  I want to write for my race. But what race will you speak,

  being American? I want to write for the living.

  But the young grow more around us every day.

  They show new faces, they come from far, they live

  occupied with escape, freeze in the passes, sail

  early in the morning. A few arrive to help.

  Mother, those were not angels, they were knights.

  Many are cast out, become artists at rejection.

  They saw the chute, the intelligible world

  so wild become, it fell, a hairy apparent star

  this time with not a public saint in sight

  to record miracle. The age of the masked and the alone begins,

  we look for sinister states, a loss shall learning suffer

  before the circle of this sun be done,

  the palace birds of the new tyrants rise

  flying into the wounded sky, sky of catastrophe;

  help may be near, but remedy is far,

  rain, blood, milk, famine, iron, and epidemic

  pour in the sky where a comet drags his tail.

  The characters of the spectacles are dead,

  nothing is left but ventriloquists and children,

  and bodies without souls are not a sacrifice.

  It is the children's voyage must be done

  before the refugees come home again.

  They run like lemmings out

  building their suffocated bodies up

  to let the full stream pass.

  The predatory birds sail over them.

  They dash themselves into lighthouses, where the great

  lights hold up,

  they laugh at sympathy : “Have you nothing better to do

  in the trenches?”

  And at that brink, that bending over doom,

  become superior to themselves, in crisis.

  There is an addition and fusion of qualities.

  They are the children. They have their games.

  They made a circle on a map of time,

  skipping they entered it, laughing lifted the agate.

  I will get you an orange cat, and a pig called Tangerine.

  The gladness-bird beats wings against an opaque glass.

  There is a white bird in the top of the tree.

  They leave their games, and pass.

  Cut. Frozen and cut. Off at the ankle. Off at the hip.

  Off at the knee. Cut off.

  Crossing the mountains many died of cold.

  We have spoken of guilt to you too long.

  The blame grows on us who carry you the news.

  And as the man bringing the story of suicide

  lives with the fact, feels murder in himself,

  as murderous regents with their gentle kings

  know the seductions of crime long before death takes hold,

  we bear their—

  a child crying shrill in a white street

  “Aviación!” among the dust of geysers,

  the curling rust of Spanish tile.

  We bear their smile, we smile under the guilt,

  in an access of sickness, “Let me alone, I'm healthy!”

  cry. And in danger, the sexually witty

  speak in short sentences, the unfulfilled.

  While definition levels others out.

  Wish : the unreality of fulfilled action.

  Wish : the reality of fulfilled thought.

  Images of luxury. Image of life.

  A phoenix at play among the peonies.

  The random torture predicts the random thought.

  Over the thought and bird and flowers, the plane.

  Coming to strange countries refugee children find

  land burned over by winter, a white field and black star

  falling like firework where no rockets are

  into hell-cities with blank brick and church-bells

  (I like this city. This is a peaceful city)

  ringing the bees in the hot garden with their mixing sounds,

  ringing the love that falters among these hills,

  red-flowering maple and the laugh of peace.

  It will take a bell-ringing god tremendous imagined descending

  for the healing of hell.

  A line of birds, a line of gods. Of bells.

  And all the birds have settled on their shadows.

  And down the shadowed street a line of children.

  You can make out the child ahead of you.

  It turns with a gesture that asks for a soft answer.

  It sees the smaller child ahead of it.

  The child ahead of it turns. Now, in the close-up

  faces throw shadow off. It is yourself

  walks down this street at five-year intervals,

  seeing yourself diminishing ahead,

  five years younger, and five years younger, and young,

  until the farthest infant has a face

  ready to grow into any child in the world.

  They take to boats. The shipwreck of New York.

  To trains whose sets of lines pass along boxes,

  children's constructions.

  Rush to rejection

  foreknowing the steps,

  disfigurement of women, insults of disease,

  negations of power. They people the earth.

  They are the strong. They see the enemy.

  They dream the relaxed heart, coming again to power,

  the struggle, the Milk-Tree of Children's Paradise.

  They are the real creation of a fictional character.

  They fuse a dead world straight.

  A line of shadowy children issues, surf issues it,

  sickness boiled in their flesh, but they are whole,

  insular strength surrounds them, hunger feeds them strong,

  the ripened sun finds them, they are the first of the world,

  free of the ferryman Nostalgia, who stares at the backward shore.

  Growing free of the old in their slow growth of death,

  they hold the flaming apples of the spring.

  They are exposed to danger.

  Ledges of water trick them,

  they fall through the raw colors of excavations,

  are crushed by monuments, high stone like whale-blow rising,

  the backwash of machines can strike them down.

  A hill on a map claims them, their procession reaches

  a wavy topographical circle where

  two gunners lie behind their steelwork margins,

  spray shot across the line, do random death.

  They fire in a world infected by trenches,

  through epidemics of injuries, Madrid, Shanghai,

  Vienna, Barcelona, all cities of contagion,

  issue survivors from the surf of the age.

  Free to be very hungry and very lonely.

  And in the countries of the mind, Cut off at the knee. Cut off at the

  armpit. Cut off at the throat.

  Free to reclaim the world and sow a legend,

  to make the adjustments never made,

  repair the promises broken and the promise kept.

  They blame our lives, lie on our wishes with their eyes our own,

  to say and to remember and avenge. A lullaby for a believing child.

  FIFTH ELEGY. A TURNING WIND

  Knowing the shape of the country. Knowing the midway travels of

  migrant fanatics, living that life, up with the dawn and

  moving as long as the light lasts, and when the sun is falling

  to wait, still standing;

  and when the black has come, at last lie down, too tired to

  turn to each other, feeling only the land's demand under them.

  Shape that exists not as permanent quality, but varies with

  even the movement of bone.

  Even in skeletons, it depends on the choices of action.

  A definite plan is visible. We are either free-movi
ng or

  fixed to some ground. The shape has no meaning

  outside of the function.

  Fixed to Europe, the distant, adjacent, we lived, with the land-

  promise of life of our own. Course down the East—frontiers

  meet you at every turn—the headlights find them, the plain's,

  and the solar cities'

  recurrent centers. And at the middle of the great world the wind

  answers the shape of the country, a turning traveller

  follows the hinge-line of coast, the first indefinite

  axis of symmetry

  torn off from sympathy with the past and planted,

  a primitive streak prefiguring the west, an ideal

  which had to be modified for stability,

  to make it work.

  Architecture is fixed not only by present needs but

  also by ancestors. The actual structure means a plan determined

  by the nature of ancestors; its details are determined by

  function and interference.

  There are these major divisions : for those attached to the seafloor,

  a fan at freedom, flexible, wavering, designed to catch food

  from all directions. For the sedentary, for those who crouch and look,

  radial symmetry,

  spokes to all margins for support. For those who want movement,

  this is achieved through bilateral symmetry only,

  a spine and straight attack, all muscles working,

  up and alive.

  And there are years of roads, and centuries of need,

  of walking along the shadow of a wall, of visiting houses,

  hearing the birds trapped in the wall, the framework trembling

  with struggles of birds,

  years of nightwalking in stranger cities, relost and unnamed,

  recurrent familiar rooms, furnished only with nightmare,

  recurrent loves, the glass eye of unreal ambition,

  years of initiation,

  of dishallucination on the diamond meadows,

  seeing the distances of false capes ahead,

  feeling the tide-following and turning wind,

  travelling farther

  under abrasive weather, to the bronzy river,

  the rust, the brown, the terrible dead swamps,

  the hanging moss the color of all the hanged,

  cities whose heels

  ring out their news of hell upon all streets,

  churches where you betray yourself, pray ended desire,

  white wooden houses of village squares. Always one gesture:

  rejecting of backdrops.

  These are the ritual years, whose lore is names of shapes,

  Grabtown, Cockade Alley, Skid Row where jobless live,

  their emblem a hitch-hiker with lips basted together,

  and marvel rivers,

  the flooded James, a double rainbow standing over Richmond,

  the remnant sky above the Cape Fear River, blue stain on red water,

  the Waccamaw with its bone-trees, Piscataqua's rich mouth,

  red Sound and flesh of sand.

  —A nation of refugees that will not learn its name;

  still shows these mothers enduring, their hidden faces,

  the cry of the hurt child at a high night-window,

  hand-to-hand warfare,

  the young sitting in libraries at their only rest

  or making love in the hallway under an orange bulb,

  the boy playing baseball at Hungry Mother State Park,

  bestiaries of cities

  and this shape, this meaning that promises seasonal joy.

  Whose form is unquietness and yet the seeker of rest,

  whose travelling hunger has range enough, its root

  grips through the world.

  The austere fire-world of night : Gary or Bethlehem,

  in sacred stacks of flame—or stainless morning,

  anti-sunlight of lakes' reflection, matchlight on face,

  the thorny light of fireworks

  lighting a way for the shape, this country of celebrations

  deep in a passage of rebirth. Adventures of countries,

  adventures of travellers, visions, or Christ's adventures

  forever following him

  lit by the night-light of history, persevering

  into the incredible washed morning air.

  The luisarne swamp is our guide and the glare ice,

  the glow of tracklights,

  the lights winding themselves into a single beacon,

  big whooping riders of night, a wind that whirls

  all of our motives into a single stroke,

  shows us a country

  of which the birds know mountains that we have not dreamed,

  climbing these unsuspected slopes they fade. Butte and pavilion

  vanish into a larger scape, morning vaults all those hills

  rising on ranges

  that stand gigantic on the roots of the world,

  where points expand in pleasure of raw sweeping

  gestures of joy, whose winds sweep down like stairs,

  and the felled forests

  on hurricane ridges show a second growth. The dances

  of turkeys near storm, a pouring light, tornado

  umbilical to earth, fountains of rain, a development

  controlled by centers,

  until the organs of this anatomy are fleshed away at last

  of gross, and determining self, develop a final structure

  in isolation. Masterpieces of happiness arrive,

  alive again in another land,

  remembering pain, faces of suffering, but they know growth,

  go through the world, hunger and rest desiring life.

  Mountains are spines to their conquest, these wrecked houses

  (vines spiral the pillars)

  are leaning their splintered sides on tornadoes, lifted careening

  in wheels, in whirlwind, in a spool of power

  drawing a spiral on the sun, drawing a sign of

  strength on the mountains,

  the fusing stars lighting initiated cities.

  The thin poor whiteness raining on the ground

  forgotten in fickle eclipses, thunderbirds of dream

  following omens,

  following charts of the moving constellations.

  Charts of the country of all visions, imperishable

  stars of our old dream : process, which having neither

  sorrow nor joy

  remains as promise, the embryo in the fire.

  The tilted cities of America, fields of metal,

  the seamless wheatfields, the current of cities running

  below our wings

  promise that knowledge of systems which may bless.

  May permit knowledge of self, a lover's wish of conversion

  until the time when the dead lake rises in light,

  the shape is organized in travelling space,

  this hope of travel, to find the place again,

  rest in the triumph of the reconceived,

  lie down again together face to face.

  SIXTH ELEGY. RIVER ELEGY

  In burning summer I saw a season of betrayal,

  the world fell away, and wasteful climbing green

  covered the breaking of bodies, covered our hearts.

  Unreal in the burning, many-motioned life

  lay like a sea, but fevers found my grief.

  I turned in that year to retrieve the stainless river,

  the lost, the flowing line of escaped music.

  Year of judgment! Century of betrayal!

  They built their cities on the banks of war

  and all their cities are down, the Floating Man

  swims in the smoke of their sky, the Double Woman

  smiles up through the water with her distorted mouth.

  I stand over reflection as the world darkens in<
br />
  destruction of countries, all souls downward set,

  life narrowing to one color of a choked river

  and hell on both its banks. My city, my city!

  They never built cities. Cities are for the living.

  They built for the half-dead and the half-alive.

  Their history is a half-history. And we go down.

  They built their villages whose lame towers fell

  where error was overgrown until the long

  tentacular ruin touches all fields. My love!

  Did I in that country build you villages?

  Great joy my love, even there, until they fell

  and green betrayal climbed over the wall.

  Defeat and raging and a burning river.

  Half-faced, half-sexed, the living dead arrive

  passing, a lip, a breast, half of a hand.

  Gaudy sadistic streets, dishonest avenues

  where every face has bargained for its eyes.

  And they come down to the river, driven down.

  And all the faces fly out of my city.

  The rich streets full of empty coats parading

  and one adolescent protesting violin,

  the slums full of their flayed and faceless bodies,

  they shiver, they are working to buy their skin.

  They are lost. They come down to look for life in a river,

  plunge, turn and plunge, they cannot change their life,

  swimming, their head is in another world.

  World without form. Chaos beaten and beaten,

  raging and suffering and hoping to take shape.

  I saw your summer. I saw your river flow.

  I being wasted everywhere saw waste.

  Hell's entropy at work and torment general,

  friend against most-known friend, love fighting off love.

  They asked for an end to emptiness; their sick throats filled

  with foam,

  prayed to be solved, and rose to deal betrayal.

  And I falling through hell passed many friends, and love,

  and a haunted woman warned me as I fell.

  Downward through currents, the horrors with little hands.

  The chaos, the web of the heart, this bleeding knot;

  raises me swimming now, one moment in the air

  and light is on my face, the fans over the river

  of wind, of goodness. Lie gasping on this shore,

  there is nothing in the world but an honest word

  which the severed away may speak before we die.

  Let me tell you what I have held to all along:

  when I said that I loved you, when I crossed the frontier,

  when I learned the obscurities of a frightened child,

  when I shut the door, and felt the sprouting tears,

  when I saw the river, when I learned resurrection,