10
Lying
blazing beside me
you rear beautifully and up—
your thinking face—
erotic body reaching
in all its colors and lights—
your erotic face
colored and lit—
not colored body-and-face
but now entire,
colors lights the world thinking and reaching.
11
The river flows past the city.
Water goes down to tomorrow
making its children I hear their unborn voices
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
12
Big-boned man young and of my dream
Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat.
I am he am I? Dreaming?
I am the bird am I? I am the throat?
A bird with a curved beak.
It could slit anything, the throat-bird.
Drawn up slowly. The curved blades, not large.
Bird emerges wet being born
Begins to sing.
13
My night awake
staring at the broad rough jewel
the copper roof across the way
thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No. Of those hours.
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?
Breaking Open
1973
1 Searching / Not Searching
WAKING THIS MORNING
Waking this morning,
a violent woman in the violent day
Laughing.
Past the line of memory along
the long body of your life
in which move childhood, youth, your lifetime of touch,
eyes, lips, chest, belly, sex, legs, to the waves of the sheet.
I look past the little plant
on the city windowsill
to the tall towers bookshaped, crushed together in greed,
the river flashing flowing corroded,
the intricate harbor and the sea, the wars, the moon, the
planets, all who people space
in the sun visible invisible.
African violets in the light
breathing, in a breathing universe. I want strong peace,
and delight,
the wild good.
I want to make my touch poems:
to find my morning, to find you entire
alive moving among the anti-touch people.
I say across the waves of the air to you:
today once more
I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking the world away
in the violent day.
DESPISALS
In the human cities, never again to
despise the backside of the city, the ghetto,
or build it again as we build the despised
backsides of houses. Look at your own building.
You are the city.
Among our secrecies, not to despise our Jews
(that is, ourselves) or our darkness, our blacks,
or in our sexuality wherever it takes us
and we now know we are productive
too productive, too reproductive
for our present invention—never to despise
the homosexual who goes building another
with touch with touch (not to despise any touch)
each like himself, like herself each.
You are this.
In the body's ghetto
never to go despising the asshole
nor the useful shit that is our clean clue
to what we need. Never to despise
the clitoris in her least speech.
Never to despise in myself what I have been taught
to despise. Not to despise the other.
Not to despise the it. To make this relation
with the it : to know that I am it.
WHAT DO WE SEE?
When they're decent about women, they're frightful about children,
When they're decent about children, they're rotten about artists,
When they're decent about artists, they're vicious about whores,
What do we see? What do we not see?
When they're kind to whores, they're death on communists,
When they respect communists, they're foul to bastards,
When they're human to bastards, they mock at hysterectomy—
What do we see? What do we not see?
When they're decent about surgery, they bomb the Vietnamese,
When they're decent to Vietnamese, they're frightful to police,
When they're human to police, they rough up lesbians,
What do we see? What do we not see?
When they're decent to old women, they kick homosexuals,
When they're good to homosexuals, they can't stand drug people,
When they're calm about drug people, they hate all Germans,
What do we see? What do we not see?
Cadenza for the reader
When they're decent to Jews, they dread the blacks,
When they know blacks, there's always something : roaches
And the future and children and all potential. Can't stand themselves
Will we never see? Will we ever know?
LOOKING AT EACH OTHER
Yes, we were looking at each other
Yes, we knew each other very well
Yes, we had made love with each other many times
Yes, we had heard music together
Yes, we had gone to the sea together
Yes, we had cooked and eaten together
Yes, we had laughed often day and night
Yes, we fought violence and knew violence
Yes, we hated the inner and outer oppression
Yes, that day we were looking at each other
Yes, we saw the sunlight pouring down
Yes, the corner of the table was between us
Yes, bread and flowers were on the table
Yes, our eyes saw each other's eyes
Yes, our mouths saw each other's mouth
Yes, our breasts saw each other's breasts
Yes, our bodies entire saw each other
Yes, it was beginning in each
Yes, it threw waves across our lives
Yes, the pulses were becoming very strong
Yes, the beating became very delicate
Yes, the calling the arousal
Yes, the arriving the coming
Yes, there it was for both entire
Yes, we were looking at each other
DESDICHADA
1
For that you never acknowledged me, I acknowledge
the spring's yellow detail, the every drop of rain,
the anonymous unacknowledged men and women.
The shine as it glitters in our child's wild eyes,
one o'clock at night. This river, this city,
the years of the shadow on the delicate skin
of my hand, moving in time.
Disinherited, annulled, finally disacknowledged
and all of my own asking. I keep that wild dimension
of life and making and the spasm
upon my mouth as I say this word of acknowledge
to you forever. Ewig. Two o'clock at night.
2
While this my day and my people are a country not yet born
it has become an earth I can
acknowledge. I must. I know what the
disacknowledgment does. Then I do take you,
but far under consciousness, knowing
that under under flows a river wanting
the other : to go open-handed in Asia,
to cleanse the tributaries and the air, to make for making,
; to stop selling death and its trash, pour plastic down
men's throats,
to let this child find, to let men and women find,
knowing the seeds in us all. They do say Find.
I cannot acknowledge it entire. But I will.
A beginning, this moment, perhaps, and you.
3
Death flowing down past me, past me, death
marvelous, filthy, gold,
in my spine in my sex upon my broken mouth
and the whole beautiful mouth of the child;
shedding power over me
death
if I acknowledge him.
Leading me
in my own body
at last in the dance.
VOICES
Voices of all our voices, running past an imagined race.
Pouring out morning light, the pouring mists of Mil Cumbres.
Out of the poured cities of our world.
Out of the black voice of one child
Who sleeps in our poverty and is dreaming.
The child perceives and the cycles are fulfilled.
Cities being poured; and war-fire over the poor.
Mist over the peak.
One child in his voices, many voices.
The suffering runs past the end of the racing
Making us run the next race. The child sleeps.
Lovers, makers, this child, enter into our voices.
Speak to the child. Now something else is waking:
The look of the lover, the rebel and learning look,
The look of the runner just beyond the tape, go into
The child's look at the world. In all its voices.
FIRE
after Vicente Aleixandre
The fire entire
withholds
passion.
Light alone!
Look—
it leaps up pure
to lick at heaven,
while all the wings
fly through.
It won't burn!
And man?
Never.
This fire
is still
free of you, man.
Light, innocent light.
And you, human:
better never be born.
WAITING FOR ICARUS
He said he would be back and we'd drink wine together
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full-time
He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don't cry
I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets,
a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions are
worse
I remember she added :Women who love such are the worst
of all
I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.
FROM CITY OF PARADISE
after Vicente Aleixandre To my city of Malaga
There was I led by a maternal hand.
Accident of flowering grillwork, that sad guitar
singing a song abruptly held in time;
the night went quiet, more quieted the lover,
the moon forever, in interrupted light.
One breath of eternity could destroy you,
prodigious city, moment emerged from a god's mind.
According to a dream man lives and does not live,
eternally gleaming like a breath of heaven.
Garden, flowers. The sea breathing, someone's arm
stretched gasping to the city swinging from peak to gulf,
white in air, have you seen birds in the wind held by gusts
and not rising in flight? O city not of earth!
By what maternal hand was I borne lightly
along your weightless streets. Barefoot by day.
Barefoot by night. Big moon. Pure sun.
The sky was you, city who lived in the sky.
You took flight in the sky with open wings.
THE QUESTION
Mother and listener she is, but she does not listen.
I look at her profile as I ask, the sweet blue-grey of eye
going obdurate to my youth as I ask the first grown sexual
question. She cannot reply.
And from then on even past her death, I cannot fully
have language with my mother, not as daughter
and mother through all the maze and silences
of all the turnings.
Until my own child grows and asks, and until
I discover what appalled my mother long before, discover
who never delivered her, until their double weakness and
strength in myself
rouse and deliver me from that refusal.
I threw myself down on the pine-needle evening.
Although that old ancient poem never did come to me,
not from you, mother,
although in answer you did only panic, you did only grieve,
and I went silent alone, my cheek to the red pine-needle
earth, and although it has taken me all these years
and sunsets to come to you, past the dying, I know,
I come with my word alive.
IN HER BURNING
The randy old
woman said
Tickle me up
I'll be
dead very soon—
Nothing will
touch me then
but the clouds
of the sky
and the bone-
white light
off the moon
Touch me
before I go
down
among the bones
My dear one
alone
to the night—
I said
I know I know
But all I know
tonight
Is that the sun
and the moon
they burn
with the one
one light.
In her burning
signing
what does the
white moon say?
The moon says
The sun
is shining.
RONDEL
Now that I am fifty-six
Come and celebrate with me—
What happens to song and sex
Now that I am fifty-six?
They dance, but differently,
Death and distance in the mix;
Now that I'm fifty-six
Come and celebrate with me.
MORE CLUES
Mother, because you never spoke to me
I go my life, do I, searching in women's faces
the lost word, a word in the shape of a breast?
Father, because both of you never touched me
do I search for men building space on space?
There was no touch, both my hands bandaged close.
I come from that, but I come far, to touch to word.
Can they reach me now, or inside out in a universe
of touch, of speech is it? somewhere in me, clues?
MYTH
Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the
roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was
the Sphi
nx. Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question.
Why didn't I recognize my mother?” “You gave the
wrong answer,” said the Sphinx. “But that was what
made everything possible,” said Oedipus. “No,” she said.
“When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,
Man. You didn't say anything about woman.”
“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include women
too. Everyone knows that.” She said, “That's what
you think.”
SEARCHING / NOT SEARCHING
Responsibility is to use the power to respond. after Robert Duncan
1
What kind of woman goes searching and searching?
Among the furrows of dark April, along the sea-beach,
in the faces of children, in what they could not tell;
in the pages of centuries—
for what man? for what magic?
In corridors under the earth, in castles of the North,
among the blackened miners, among the old
I have gone searching.
The island-woman told me, against the glitter of sun
on the stalks and leaves of a London hospital.
I searched for that Elizabethan man,
the lost discoverer, the servant of time;
and that man forgotten for belief, in Spain,
and among the faces of students, at Coventry,
finding and finding in glimpses. And at home.
Among the dead I too have gone searching,
a blue light in the brain.
Suddenly I come to these living eyes,
I a live woman look up at you this day
I see all the colors in your look.
2 MIRIAM : THE RED SEA
High above shores and times,
I on the shore
forever and ever.
Moses my brother
has crossed over
to milk, honey,
that holy land.
Building Jerusalem.
I sing forever
on the seashore.
I do remember
horseman and horses,
waves of passage
poured into war,
all poured into journey.
My unseen brothers
have gone over;
chariots
deep seas under.
I alone stand here
ankle-deep
and I sing, I sing,
until the lands
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 47