Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser
Page 35
of lenient evening to the center. Green
on shadows of Indiana, level yellow miles…
The prairie emblems and the slopes of the sky
and desert stars enlarging in the frost
redeem us like our love and will not die.
All origins are here, and in this range
the changing spirit can make itself again,
continually love, continually change.
Out of the myth the mother leaned;
From out the mother shines the child;
Man rises, in the mass contained;
And from this growth creation grows.
The fire through all the spiral flows:
Create the creative, many-born!
And use your love, unreconciled!
In wheels, in whirlwind, in a storm of power
alive again and over every land
the thunderbird with lightnings at his wrists.
Eclipses uncloud and show us miracle,
gleaming, our ancestors, all antagonists:
Slave and Conquistador, dead hand-to-hand,
scented fastidious Tory with his whore,
distinguished rebel and woman at the plow.
The fiery embryo umbilical
always to failure, and form developing
American out of conflict.
Fierce dissenting ghosts,
the second Adams' fever and eagle voice
and Jackson's muscular democratic sense.
Sprung in one birth John Brown, a mad old man
whose blood in a single broken gesture freed
many beliefs; and Lincoln's agony
condemning and confirming. O, they cry,
the oppositions cry, O fight for me!
Fight, you are bound to freedom, and be free!
When Hawthorne saw the fabulous gift, he tore
flesh from his guilt, and found more guilt; the bells
rang barter of the self, but Melville drowned.
The doubled phantoms bring to our terrible
chaos the order of a meeting-place
where the exchange is made, the agonies
lie down at last together face to face.
In the black night of blood, the forms begin
to glitter alive, fathers of constellations,
the shining and the music moving on.
We are bound by the deepest feuds to unity.
To make the connections and be born again,
create the creative, that will love the world.
Not glistening Indies, not continents, but the world
opening now, and the greatness of our age
that makes its own antagonists of the wish.
We want to find and will spend our lives in finding:
the landfall of our broken voyages
is still our America of contradictions.
Ancestors of that dream lie coupled in our flesh,
pieces of animals, pieces of all our friends
meet in us and we live. We do not die.
Magical keen Magellan sought a rose
among the compass and legendary winds.
Green sequels rocked his eyes in water; he
hung with the scorpion sun on noon's glass wall,
stared down, down into the future as he sailed.
Fanatic travels, recurrent mysteries.
Those who want the far shore spend their lives on the ocean.
The hand of God flowers in coasts for these.
Those who want only home spend their lives in the sky.
Flying over tonight, while thirteen searchlights join
high incandescent asters on black air.
The blinding center fastens on a plane
floating and white, glare-white; he wanting land
and intimate fertile hours, hangs there. Sails
great scends of danger, or wades through crazy sand.
Those who most long for peace now pour their lives on war.
Our conflicts carry creation and its guilt,
these years' great arms are full of death and flowers.
A world is to be fought for, sung, and built:
Love must imagine the world.
The wish of love
moving upon the body of love describes
closing of conflict, repeats the sacred ways
in which the spirit dances and survives.
To that far meeting-place call home the enemies—
they keep their oppositions, for the strong
ironic joy of old intensities
still carries virile music.
O, the young
will come up
after us
and make the dream,
the real world of our myth.
But now, the song
they will discover is a shadowy theme—
Today we are bound, for freedom binds us—we
live out the conflict of our time, until
Love, finding all the antagonists in the dance,
moved by its moods and given to its grace,
resolves the doom
and the deliverance.
TENTH ELEGY. ELEGY IN JOY
Now green, now burning, I make a way for peace.
After the green and long beyond my lake,
among those fields of people, on these illuminated
hills, gold, burnt gold, spilled gold and shadowed blue,
the light of enormous flame, the flowing light of the sea,
where all the lights and nights are reconciled.
The sea at last, where all the waters lead.
And all the wars to this peace.
For the sea does not lie like the death you imagine;
this sea is the real sea, here it is.
This is the living. This peace is the face of the world,
a fierce angel who in one lifetime lives
fighting a lifetime, dying as we all die,
becoming forever, the continual god.
Years of our time, this heart! The binding of the alone,
bells of all loneliness, binding our lands and our music,
branches full of motion each opening its own flower,
lands of all song, each speaking in his own voice.
Praise in every grace
among the old same war.
Years of betrayal, million death breeding its weaknesses
and hope, buried more deep more black than dream.
Every elegy is the present : freedom eating our hearts,
death and explosion, and the world unbegun.
Now burning and unbegun, I sing earth with its war,
and God the future, and the wish of man.
Though you die, your war lives : the years fought it,
fusing a dead world straight.
The living will be giving you your meanings,
widening to love because of the love of man.
All the wounds crying
I feare, and hope : I burne, and frese like yse…
saying to the beloved
For your sake I love cities,
on your love I love the many,
saying to the people,
for your sake I love the world.
The old wounds crying
I find no peace, and all my warres are done.
Out of our life the living eyes
See peace in our own image made,
Able to give only what we can give:
Bearing two days like midnight. “Live,”
The moment offers; the night requires
Promise effort love and praise.
Now there are no maps and no magicians.
No prophets but the young prophet, the sense of the world.
The gift of our time, the world to be discovered.
All the continents giving off their several lights,
the one sea, and the air. And all things glow.
Move as this sea moves, as water, as force.
Peace shines from its life,
its war can become
at any moment the fierce shining of peace,
and all the life-night long many voices are saying
The name of all things is Glowing.
A beginning, a moment of rest that imagines.
And again I go wandering far and alone,
I rise at night, I start up in the silence—
lovely and silver-black the night remembers.
In the cities of America I make my peace;
among the bombs and commands,
the sound that war makes
NO NO
We see their weeping and their lifetime dreams.
All this, they say to us, because of you.
Much to begin. Now be your green, your burning,
bear also our joy, come to our meeting-place
and in the triumph of the reconceived
lie down at last together face to face.
We tell beginnings : for the flesh and answer,
for the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.
The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.
This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look,
this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation
journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of a wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.
Body of Waking
1958
1
HAYING BEFORE STORM
This sky is unmistakable. Not lurid, not low, not black.
Illuminated and bruise-color, limitless, to the noon
Full of its floods to come. Under it, field, wheels, and mountain,
The valley scattered with friends, gathering in
Live-colored harvest, filling their arms; not seeming to hope
Not seeming to dread, doing.
I stand where I can see
Holding a small pitcher, coming in toward
The doers and the day.
These images are all
Themselves emerging: they face their moment: love or go down,
A blade of the strong hay stands like light before me.
The sky is a torment on our eyes, the sky
Will not wait for this golden, it will not wait for form.
There is hardly a moment to stand before the storm.
There is hardly time to lay hand to the great earth.
Or time to tell again what power shines past storm.
PHANERON
Whatever roams the air is traveling
Over these griefs, these wars and this good.
Whatever cries and changes, lives and reaches
Across the threshold of sense; I know the piercing name;
Among my silence, in cold, the birth-cry came.
Salt of these tears whitens my eyelashes.
Whatever plows the body turns to food:
Before my face, flowers, color which is form.
Cries plow the sea and air and turn to birth
Upon the people-sown, people-flowering earth.
A year turns in its crisis. In its sleep.
Whatever plows our dreams is ours to keep.
Whatever plows our dreams is ours to give:
The threshold rises and changes.
I give, I perceive;
Here are the gifts of day risen at last;
Blood of desire, the riding of belief
Beyond our fury and our silences.
THE YOUNG GIRL OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
Stallions go leap, and rimfire knows,
Where there was sleep the ware eye goes,
Out of the rotten climbs the rose.
I will remember how the music went
When he sang down my fears.
A murder ballad blown by the moon away,
And all your dreaming could not make him stay.
He wants the blue counties, the way to Africa.
Lean east lean west, the thousand ocean knows,
How soon do you come to the center again?
Nightmary, zip me up, the avenue
Is black, I'll start in the dark of the moon—
Flat miles away my love who never knew
Wakes and leans on the windowsill,
Wanting the sea-breasts of an unborn girl.
Hills climb, songs climb, and I will find him out,
My child will leap like stallions from my mouth
Before the traveler moon can light my heart.
There'll be a gun, and there'll be storms of roses,
All Indiana crystal in my tears.
A BIRTH
Lately having escaped three-kinded death
Not by evasion but by coming through
I celebrate what may be true beginning.
But new begun am most without resource
Stupid and stopped. How do the newborn grow?
I am of them. Freshness has taken our hearts;
Pain strips us to the source, infants of further life
Waiting for childhood as we wait for form.
So came I into the world of all the living
The maimed triumphant middle of my way
Where there is giving needing no forgiving.
Saw now the present that is here to say:
Nothing I wrote is what I must see written,
Nothing I did is what I now need done.—
The smile of darkness on my song and my son.
Lately emerged I have seen unfounded houses,
Have seen spirits not opened, surrounded as by sun,
And have, among limitless consensual faces
Watched all things change, an unbuilt house inherit
Materials of desire, that stone and wood and air.
Lit by a birth, I defend dark beginnings,
Waste that is never waste, most-human giving,
Declared and clear as the mortal body of grace.
Beginnings of truth-in-life, the rooms of wilderness
Where truth feeds and the ramifying heart,
Even mine, praising even the past in its pieces,
My tearflesh beckoner who brought me to this place.
KING'S MOUNTAIN
In all the cities of this year
I have longed for the other city.
In all the rooms of this year
I have entered one red room.
In all the futures I have walked toward
I have seen a future I can hardly name.
But here the road we drive
Turns upon another country.
I have seen white beginnings,
A slow sea without glaze or speed,
Movement of land, a long lying-down dance.
This is fog-country. Milk. Country of time.
I see your tormented color, the steep front of your storm
Break dissipated among limitless profiles.
I see the shapes of waves in the cross-sea
Advance, a fog-surface over the fog-floor.
Seamounts, slow-flowing. Color. Plunge-point of air.
In all the meanings of this year
There will be the ferny meaning.
It rises leaning and green, streams through star-lattices;
Forgets the limitations of our love,
These drifts and caves dissolve and pillars of these countries
Long-crested dissolve to the future, a new form.
MOTHER GARDEN'S ROUND
The year was river-throated, with the stare of legend,
Then truth the whirlwind and Mother Garden. Death.
And now these stars, antlers, the masks of speech,
And the one ghost a glove in the middle of the floor.
Garden my green may grow.
If you were here tonight, my heart would rest,
Would rest on a support, happy thereon.
Something is dancing on leafdrift, dancing across the graves:
A child is watching while the world breaks open.
Garden my green may grow.
Speed of a red fox running along this street.
Everyone could have seen it, no one is now awake.
Separations all year and the seeking of roots.
It was a lie, Mother Garden, they do not wish for death.
Garden my green may grow.
They wish only to live again. No more the whirlwind.
One colored pebble now, one look, the singular
Opening of the lips; a leaf happens to speak.
I remember in love you walked to me straight across that room.
Garden my green may grow.
The suffering of your absence flies around me now,
No house can keep out this flying of small birds.
Feathers, bird-feathers, settle upon my waking.
The agonies are open. Faces, dead within them; and on these faces
And filling the clefts and on my hands and eyes
The little fresh pain flutters. Whitening the grass,
Snowing through the windows. Drifting over the floor.
Touching my face when, almost, touch means kindness.
My dear dream, Mother Garden. We wish to be born again.
Death death may my green grow.
RITE
My father groaned; my mother wept.
Among the mountains of the west
A deer lifted her golden throat.
They tore the pieces of the kill
While two dark sisters laughed and sang.—
The hidden lions blare until
The hunters charge and burn them all.
And in the black apartment halls
Of every city in the land
A father groans; a mother weeps;
A girl to puberty has come;
They shriek this, this is the crime