Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser
Page 45
tell me this side and tell me that side,
news of the road near Agde.
Word from this side, word from the tree-side—
Spain at our back : agony : before me, glitter,
today
blinding my eyes, blind diamonds, one clear wound.
Something is flying out of the sky behind me.
Turning, stirring of dream, something is speeding,
something is overtaking.
Stirrings in prisons, on beds, the mouths of the young,
resist, dance, love. It drives through the back of my head,
through my eyes and breasts and mouth.
I know a harvest : mass in the wine country.
A lifetime after, and still alive.
Something out of Spain, into the general light!
I drive blind white, trusting news of this side,
news of that side, all the time the line of the poem:
Amor, pena, desig, somni, dolor.
The grapes have become wine by the hand of man.
Sea risen from the sea, a bearded king.
The seaward cemetery risen from the sea
like a woman rising.
Amor.
Phases of sun.
The wine declared god by the hand of man.
Pena.
A rumor given me by this side and that side.
We drive in brilliant glitter, in jungle night, in distant war,
in all our cities, in a word, overtaking.
Desig.
A cry received, gone past me into all men,
speaking, into all women.
A man goes into the sea,
bearded fire and all things rise from this blaze of eyes,
living, it speaks, driving forth from Spain,
somni, dolor,
These cliffs, these years. Do we drive into light?
Driven, live, overtaken?
Amor, pena, desig.
ENDLESS
Under the tall black sky you look out of your body
lit by a white flare of the time between us
your body with its touch its weight smelling of new wood
as on the day the news of battle reached us
falls beside the endless river
flowing to the endless sea
whose waves come to this shore a world away.
Your body of new wood your eyes alive barkbrown of treetrunks
the leaves and flowers of trees stars all caught in crowns of trees
your life gone down, broken into endless earth
no longer a world away but under my feet and everywhere
I look down at the one earth under me,
through to you and all the fallen
the broken and their children born and unborn
of the endless war.
2 Games
THE BACKSIDE OF THE ACADEMY
Five brick panels, three small windows, six lions' heads
with rings in their mouths, five pairs of closed bronze doors—
the shut wall with the words carved across its head
ART REMAINS THE ONE WAY POSSIBLE OF
SPEAKING TRUTH.—
On this May morning, light swimming in this street,
the children running,
on the church beside the Academy the lines are flying
of little yellow-and-white plastic flags flapping in the light;
and on the great shut wall, the words are carved across:
WE ARE YOUNG AND WE ARE FRIENDS OF TIME.—
Below that, a light blue asterisk in chalk
and in white chalk, Hector, Joey, Lynn, Rudolfo.
A little up the street, a woman shakes a small dark boy,
she shouts What's wrong with you, ringing that bell!
In the street of rape and singing, poems, small robberies,
carved in an oblong panel of the stone:
CONSCIOUS UTTERANCE OF THOUGHT BY
SPEECH OR ACTION
TO ANY END IS ART.—
On the lowest reach of the walls are chalked the words:
Jack is a object,
Walter and Trina, Goo Goo, I love Trina,
and further along Viva Fidel now altered to Muera Fidel.
A deep blue marble is lodged against the curb.
A phone booth on one corner; on the other, the big mesh
basket for trash.
Beyond them, the little park is always locked. For the two
soldier brothers.
And past that goes on an eternal football game
which sometimes, as on this day in May, transforms to stickball
as, for one day in May,
five pairs of closed bronze doors will open
and the Academy of writers, sculptors, painters, composers,
their guests and publishers will all roll in and
the wave of organ music come rolling out into
the street where light now blows and papers and little
children and words, some breezes of Spanish blow
and many colors of people.
A watch cap lies fallen against a cellophane which used
to hold pistachio nuts
and here before me, on my street,
five brick panels, three small windows, six lions' heads with
rings in their mouths, five pairs of closed bronze doors,
light flooding the street I live and write in; and across the
river the one word FREE against the ferris wheel and
the roller coaster,
and here, painted upon the stones, Chino, Bobby, Joey,
Fatmoma, Willy, Holy of God
and also Margaret is a shit and also fuck and shit;
far up, invisible at the side of the building:
WITHOUT VISION THE PEO
and on the other side, the church side,
where shadows of trees and branches, this day in May, are
printed balanced on the church wall,
in-focus trunks and softened-focus branches
below the roof where the two structures stand,
bell and cross, antenna and weathervane,
I can see past the church the words of an ending line:
IVE BY BREAD ALONE.
MOUNTAIN : ONE FROM BRYANT
Wildflowers withering with the same death.
Grave a slope, threw she long shadows,
Mountains o'erlooking earth, affect and places
High. On God that time, the elder worshipper,
Deemed spirit, made here a tribe of offering,
Bear and wolf of skins shaggy, maze of ears
And garlands lay. Mother, my dreams, night and
Mockings like friends, pastimes hate I
And business accursed upon me glares;
The life of the sick is sorrow, guilt, and love.
Eye her then, vain in might, simple as heart.
Heaven props earth with columns; mountains raise
Distances, blue in hills, upward swell fields.
Man has ages for soil, mining himself
To paradise. The scene murmurs. Struggle with winds,
Hear depth dizzy the ear, a thunderbolt of whiteness.
Centuries of growth, darkness of capitals,
Pinnacles and trees shaggy and wild.
North to the drowned! and nations separate the world.
Shriek eagle in your torrent solitude.
Glens of secret, down into forest-tops,
Beneath a wide-spread earth; majesty and beauty
Fail. Foot mountains. Though rocky our ascent,
Face nature in harmony, lovely, and face it! wild.
THE FLYING RED HORSE
On all the streetcorners the children are standing,
They ask What can it mean?
The grownups answer A flying red horse
Signifies gasoline.
The man at the Planetarium,
Pointing beyond the sky,
Is not going to say
that Pegasus
Means poetry.
Some of our people feel like death,
And some feel rather worse.
His energy, in this night of lies,
Flies right against the curse.
What's red? What is the flying horse?
They swear they do not know,
But just the same, and every night,
All the streetcorners glow.
Even the Pentagon, even the senators,
Even the President sitting on his arse—
Never mind—over all cities
The flying red horse.
3
THE OUTER BANKS
1
Horizon of islands shifting
Sea-light flame on my voice
burn in me
Light
flows from the water from sands islands of this horizon
The sea comes toward me across the sea. The sand
moves over the sand in waves
between the guardians of this landscape
the great commemorative statue on one hand
—the first flight of man, outside of dream,
seen as stone wing and stainless steel—
and at the other hand
banded black-and-white, climbing
the spiral lighthouse.
2
Flood over ocean,
avalanche on the flat beach. Pouring.
Indians holding branches up, to
placate the tempest,
the one-legged twisting god that is
a standing wind.
Rays are branching from all things:
great serpent, great plume, constellation:
sands from which colors and light pass,
the lives of plants. Animals. Men.
A man and a woman reach for each other.
3
Wave of the sea.
4
Sands have washed, sea has flown over us.
Between the two guardians, spiral, truncated wing,
history and these wild birds
Bird-voiced discoverers : Hariot, Hart Crane,
the brothers who watched gulls.
“No bird soars in a calm,” said Wilbur Wright.
Dragon of the winds forms over me.
Your dance, goddesses in your circle
sea-wreath, whirling of the event
behind me on land as deep in our own lives
we begin to know the movement to come.
Sunken, drowned spirals,
hurricane-dance.
5
Shifting of islands on this horizon.
The cycle of changes in the Book of Changes.
Two islands making an open female line
That powerful long straight bar a male island.
The building of the surf
constructing immensities
between the pale flat Sound
and ocean ever
birds as before earthquake
winds fly from all origins
the length of this wave goes from the great wing
down coast, the barrier beach in all its miles
road of the sun and the moon to
a spiral lighthouse
to the depth turbulence
lifts up its wave like cities
the ocean in the air
spills down the world.
6
A man is walking toward me across the water.
From far out, the flat waters of the Sound,
he walks pulling his small boat
In the shoal water.
A man who is white and has been fishing.
Walks steadily upon the light of day
Coming closer to me where I stand
looking into the sun and the blaze inner water.
Clear factual surface over which he pulls
a boat over a closing quarter-mile.
7
Speak to it, says the light.
Speak to it music,
voices of the sea and human throats.
Origins of spirals,
the ballad and original sweet grape
dark on the vines near Hatteras,
tendrils of those vines, whose spiral tower
now rears its light, accompanying
all my voices.
8
He walks toward me. A black man in the sun.
He now is a black man speaking to my heart
crisis of darkness in this century
of moments of this speech.
The boat is slowly nearer drawn, this man.
The zigzag power coming straight, in stones,
in arcs, metal, crystal, the spiral
in sacred wet
schematic elements of
cities, music, arrangement
spin these stones of home
under the sea
return to the stations of the stars
and the sea, speaking across its lives.
9
A man who is bones is close to me
drawing a boat of bones
the sun behind him
is another color of fire,
the sea behind me
rears its flame.
A man whose body flames and tapers in flame
twisted tines of remembrance that dissolve
a pitchfork of the land worn thin
flame up and dissolve again
draw small boat
Nets of the stars at sunset over us.
This draws me home to the home of the wild birds
long-throated birds of this passage.
This is the edge of experience, grenzen der seele
where those on the verge of human understanding
the borderline people stand on the shifting islands
among the drowned stars and the tempest.
“Everyman's mind, like the dumbest,
claws at his own furthest limits of knowing the world,”
a man in a locked room said.
Open to the sky
I stand before this boat that looks at me.
The man's flames are arms and legs.
Body, eyes, head, stars, sands look at me.
I walk out into the shoal water
and throw my leg over the wall of the boat.
10
At one shock, speechlessness.
I am in the bow, on the short thwart.
He is standing before me amidships, rowing forward
like my old northern sea-captain in his dory.
All things have spun.
The words gone,
I facing sternwards, looking at the gate
between the barrier islands. As he rows.
Sand islands shifting and the last of land
a pale and open line horizon
sea.
With whose face did he look at me?
What did I say? or did I say?
in speechlessness
move to the change.
These strokes provide the music,
and the accused boy on land today saying
What did I say? or did I say?
The dream on land last night built this the boat of death
but in the suffering of the light
moving across the sea
do we in our moving
move toward life or death
11
Hurricane, skullface, the sky's size
winds streaming through his teeth
doing the madman's twist
and not a beach not flooded
nevertheless, here
stability of light
my other silence
and at my left hand and at my right hand
no longer wing and lighthouse
no longer the guardians.
They are in me, in my speechless
life of barrier beach.
As it lies open
to the night, out there.
Now seeing my death before me
starting again, among the
drowned men,
desperate men, unprotected discoverers,
and the man before me
here.
Stroke by stroke drawing us.
Out there? Father of rhythms,
deep wave, mother.
There is no out there.
All is open.
Open water. Open I.
12
The wreck of the Tiger, the early pirate, the blood-clam's
ark, the tern's acute eye, all buried mathematical
instruments, castaways, pelicans, drowned five-strand
pearl necklaces, hopes of livelihood,
hopes of grace,
walls of houses, sepia sea-fences, the writhen octopus and
those tall masts and sails,
marked hulls of ships and last month's plane, dipping his salute
to the stone wing of dream,
turbulence, Diamond Shoals, the dark young living people:
“Sing one more song and you are under arrest.”
“Sing another song.”
Women, ships, lost voices.
Whatever has dissolved into our waves.
I a lost voice
moving, calling you
on the edge of the moment that is now the center.
From the open sea.
4 Lives
AKIBA
THE WAY OUT
The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man,
with signs, and his journeys. Where the rock is split
and speaks to the water; the flame speaks to the cloud;
the red splatter, abstraction, on the door
speaks to the angel and the constellations.
The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon.
And the loud hammering of the land behind
speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs,
we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea.
All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage.
Music of one child carried into the desert;
firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid.
Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people
led by the water-drawn man to the smoke mountain.
The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs,
the burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening.
Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain.
Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child.
The meaning beginning to move, which is the song.
Music of those who have walked out of slavery.
Into that journey where all things speak to all things
refusing to accept the curse, and taking
for signs the signs of all things, the world, the body
which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world,
all creation being created in one image, creation.