it is on my teeth, the song
it is pouring the song
wine and lightning
the rivers coming to confluence
in me entire.
5
But that was years ago. My child is grown.
His wife and he in exile, that is, home,
longing for home, and I home, that is exile, the much-loved country
like the country called parents, much-loved that was, and exile.
His wife and he turning toward the thought
of their own child, conceive we say, a child.
Now rise in me the old dealings : father, mother,
not years ago, but in my last-night dream,
waking this morning, the two Mexican figures
black stone with their stone hollows I fill with water,
fill with wine, with oil, poems and lightning.
Black in morning dark, the sky going blue,
the river going blue.
Moving toward new form I am—
carry again
all the old gifts and wars.
6
Black parental mysteries
groan and mingle in the night.
Something will be born of this.
Pay attention to what they tell you to forget
pay attention to what they tell you to forget
pay attention to what they tell you to forget
Farewell the madness of the guardians
the river, the window, they are the guardians,
there is no guardian, it is all built into me.
Do I move toward form, do I use all my fears?
PAINTERS
In the cave with a long-ago flare
a woman stands, her arm up. Red twig, black twig, brown twig.
A wall of leaping darkness over her.
The men are out hunting in the early light
But here in this flicker, one or two men, painting
and a woman among them.
Great living animals grow on the stone walls,
their pelts, their eyes, their sex, their hearts,
and the cave-painters touch them with life, red, brown, black,
a woman among them, painting.
RUNE
The word in the bread feeds me,
The word in the moon leads me,
The word in the seed breeds me,
The word in the child needs me.
The word in the sand builds me,
The word in the fruit fills me,
The word in the body mills me,
The word in the war kills me.
The word in the man takes me,
The word in the storm shakes me,
The word in the work makes me,
The word in the woman rakes me,
The word in the word wakes me.
HOW WE DID IT
We all traveled into that big room,
some from very far away
we smiled at some we knew
we did not as we talked agree
our hearts went fast thinking of morning
when we would walk along the path.
We spoke. Late night. We disagreed.
We knew we would climb the Senate steps.
We knew we would present our claim
we would demand : be strong now : end the war.
How would we do it? What would we ask?
“We will be warned,” one said. “They will warn us and take us.”
“We can speak and walk away.”
“We can lie down as if in mourning.”
“We can lie down as a way of speech,
speaking of all the dead in Asia.”
Then Eqbal said, “We are not at this moment
a revolutionary group, we are
a group of dissenters. Let some, then,
walk away, let some stand until they want to leave,
let some lie down and let some be arrested. Some of us.
Let each do what he feels at that moment
tomorrow.” Eqbal's dark face.
The doctor spoke, of friendships made in jail.
We looked into each other's eyes
and went all to our rooms, to sleep,
waiting for morning.
ISLANDS
O for God's sake
they are connected
underneath
They look at each other
across the glittering sea
some keep a low profile
Some are cliffs
The bathers think
islands are separate like them
BLUE SPRUCE
Of all green trees, I love a nevergreen
blue among dark blue, these almost black
needles guarded the door there was, years
before the white guardians over Sète
…that's Sea France at the Sea Cemetery
near Spain where Valéry…
those short square Mediterranean
man and woman
couple at the black-cut shadow door
within the immense marine
glare of noon,
and on the beach
leaning from one strong hip
a bearded Poseidon
looking along the surface of the sea
father and husband there he stands
and an invisible woman him beside
blue-eyed blue-haired blue-shadowed
under the sun and the moon
they blaze upon us
and we waiting waiting
swim to the source
very blue evening now deepening
needles of light ever new
a tree of light and a tree of darkness
blue spruce
ARTIFACT
When this hand is gone to earth,
this writing hand and the paper beneath it,
long gone, and the words on the paper forgotten,
and the breath that slowly curls around earth with
its old spoken words
gone into lives unborn and they too gone to earth—
and their memory, memory of any of these gone,
and all who remembered them absorbed in air and dirt,
words, earth, breeze over the oceans, all these now other,
there may as in the past be something left,
some artifact. This pen. Will it tell my? Will it tell our?
This thing made in bright metal by thousands unknown to me,
will it arrive with that unnameable wish to speak a music,
offering something out of all I moved among?
singing for others unknown a long-gone moment in old time sung?
The pen—
will some broken pieces be assembled by women, by guessing men
(or future mutations, beings unnamed by us)—
can these dry pieces join? Again go bright? Speak to you then?
MS. LOT
Well, if he treats me like a young girl still,
That father of mine, and here's my sister
And we're still traveling into the hills—
But everyone on the road knows he offered us
To the Strangers when all they wanted was men,
And the cloud of smoke still over the twin cities
And mother a salt lick the animals come to—
Who's going to want me now?
Mother did not even know
She was not to turn around and look.
God spoke to Lot, my father.
She was hard of hearing. He knew that.
I don't believe he told her, anyway.
What kind of father is that, or husband?
He offered us to those men. They didn't want women.
Mother always used to say:
Some normal man will come along and need you.
BOYS IN THE BRANCHES
Blue in the green trees, what are they climbing?
And girls bringing water, what are they watering
With their buckets spilli
ng the wet dark on dry ground?
And up the hill the concrete-mixers rolling
Owned by my father when I was the same youth
As these who are my students, boys in the branches,
Young women in the young trees.
The last few drops from the faucet, carried
To the tan crumbling earth.
The earth belongs to the authorities
Of this college, and the authorities
Have turned the water off, have they?
Ask the owners of colleges, who is in the trees?
Ask the owners of concrete-mixers, who is holding
This acre of city land against the concrete?
We know where the water is.
Blue green students in the branches
Defending the tree. The trees begin to shudder.
The concrete-mixers roll over exposed roots.
But isn't all this a romantic delusion?
You love the pouring of the city, don't you?
You need the buildings, don't you?
Sift the seeds. We need to sift the seeds.
We know where the water is.
They have turned the water off.
You don't want buildings not to be built, do you?
The blueprint lies on the flat-top desk.
The building now is two years built,
Most of the boys went off to war,
I don't teach there any more.
Here we go, swimming to civilization,
We who stand and water and sift the seeds,
My students saying their word, it flies behind what I hear in the air:
“Time is God's blood,” Warren said. Avra wrote:
“Forgive me, Mother. I am alive.”
SONG : LYING IN DAYLIGHT
Lying in daylight, in the strong
light of all our fantasies,
now touch speaking to touch, touch sees—
night and light, the darkness-stare,
your long look that pierces where
light never came till now—
moving is what we do,
moving we are, searching,
going high and underground,
rain behind rain pouring down,
river under river going
silence on silence
sound under sound.
HYPNOGOGIC FIGURE
A translation, from Gunnar Ekelöf
In woods you know stands the wonder-working madonna
You stub your foot on the plinth when you walk lost
among trees
She looks like your small bronze bell, the one in the
shape of
a little girl with a stand-up collar
But it is limitless and dark, of tarnished silver
When you crawl under her skirt, you will see the inside
but up there, the clapper is gone, nothing is hanging down;
bulging like Atreus' treasure-chamber, a great bell
Ask for her sons, there are many, X, Y and Z
You may find a door in the creases of underwear
and grope your way up along peculiar stairways
winding in precarious spirals like the climb up the tower at Pisa
You are dizzy already. The risers are irregular
Gravity works against the spiral and the balance
you thought built-in no longer functions, you stumble
Above the vault is her waist, you see it as her belt
from the inside, a shimmer of colors, yellow violet and blood-red
It is studded with square-cut stones rose-stones garnets
aquamarines and chrysolites and amethysts
Each stone is a chamber, a triangle pointing inward
along two sides are divans, the hypotenuse is the window
or a rectangle with three divans and a table in the middle
You can walk from room to room or take your ease
responding to color and your state of being. You can go all the way
You will still never get back. Your vision has changed.
I have been higher up—I could not see the heart
but saw the jewel on her breast like a rose-window shimmering
upon her breasts. Once I went higher up, once only:
in her Head. There was empty space. You floated in
weightlessness.
THE LOST ROMANS
Where are they, not those young men, not those
young women
Who walked among the bullet-headed Romans with their
roads, their symmetry, their iron rule—
We know the dust and bones they are gone to, those
young Romans
Who stood against the bitter imperial, their young
green life with its poems—
Where are the poems made music against the purple
Setting their own purple up for a living sign,
Bright fire of some forgotten future against empire,
Their poems in the beautiful Roman tongue
Sex-songs, love-poems, freedom-songs?
Not only the young, but the old and in chains,
The slaves in their singing, the fierce northern
gentle blond rhythms,
The Judean cantillations, lullabies of Carthage,
Gaul with her cries, all the young Roman rebels,
Where are their songs? Who will unlock them,
Who will find them for us, in some undiscovered
painted cave
For we need you, sisters, far brothers, poems
of our lost Rome.
CANAL
Sea-shouldering Ithaca
staring past sunset
after the islands
darkening closing
The narrow night. We
came in from Ithaca
into the inland
narrow water
trying to keep awake
while the ship went forward
but sleep came down
shouldering
down like Ithaca.
Night smites, light smites
and again light
in a narrow place
of old whiteness.
We are in
the narrowest place
moving in still
through an ash-white canal
a whitened plant
grappled to this wall
deep-cut, Judean slaves
cut the narrowest place
the ship fares into,
light smites again
the olive-plant in the crevice
captained through light.
FOR KAY BOYLE
What is the skill of this waking? Heard the singing
of that man rambling up Frederick Street in music
and his repeated ecstasy, in a long shaken line.
After many and many a February storm, cyclamen
and many a curtain of rain, the tearing of all curtains
and, as you said, making love and facing the police
in one afternoon. A few bright colors in permanent ink:
black sea, light like streetlight green, blue sees in you
the sun and the moon that stand as your guardians.
And the young bearded rebels and students tearing it all away,
all of it, down to the truth that barefaced naked act of
light, streamings of the courage of the sources,
the sun and the moon that stand at your ears.
RESURRECTION OF THE RIGHT SIDE
When the half-body dies its frightful death
forked pain, infection of snakes, lightning, pull down the
voice. Waking
and I begin to climb the mountain on my mouth,
word by stammer, walk stammered, the lurching deck of earth.
Left-right with none of my own rhythms
the long-established sex and poetry.
I go running in sleep,
but waking stumble down corridors of self, all
rhythms gone.
The broken movement of love sex out of rhythm
one halted name in a shattered language
ruin of French-blue lights behind the eyes
slowly the left hand extends a hundred feet
and the right hand follows follows
but still the power of sight is very weak
but I go rolling this ball of life, it rolls
and I follow it whole up the slowly-brightening slope
A whisper attempts me, I whisper without stammer
I walk the long hall to the time of a metronome
set by a child's gun-target left-right
the power of eyesight is very slowly arriving
in this late impossible daybreak
all the blue flowers open
THE WARDS
St. George's Hospital, Hyde Park Corner
Lying in the moment, she climbs white snows;
At the foot of the bed the chart relates.
Here a man burns in fever; he is here, he is there,
Five thousand years ago in the cave country.
In this bed, I go wandering in Macao,
I run all night the black alleys. Time runs
Over the edge and all exists in all. We hold
All human history, all geography,
I cannot remember the word for what I need.
Our explorations, all at the precipice,
The night-table, a landscape of zebras,
Transistor constellations. All this music,
I heard it forming before I was born. I come
In this way, to the place.
Our selves lit clear,
This moment giving me necessity
Gives us ourselves and we risk everything,
Walking into our life.
THE SUN-ARTIST
for Bob Miller
1
The opening of the doors. Dark.
The opening of the large doors.
Out of the daylight and the scent of trees
and that lake where generations of swans
no longer move among children. In a poisoned time.
But the bright-headed children move.
Dark, high, the beams of a huge building
exposed in the high dark air.
I see brightness with a shock of joy.
2
Past the darkness a lashing of color.
Not color, strands of light.
Not light but pure deep color beyond color,
like the pure fierce light I once knew, before
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 52