Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  Never again set me so high, away

  From action, pocketed in loneliness from fear,

  And hurt, perhaps, but from the working-day.

  [UNTITLED]

  Dear place, sweet home.

  I do not know the streets of London, the Parisian squares,

  The Berlin parks, nor the far ways of Rome.

  I do not know this city.

  But I have seen

  White mothers, and the bearded foreigners,

  Workers with hands, and merchants of exchange,

  Their places. My places: the broad avenues,

  The rivers with their momentary changes,

  Places housing the small and beautiful acts

  That are accomplished, and the ugly facts. My people, these,

  who may disown me even against my wish,

  the people of my birth.

  City city city

  O my delight

  New York.

  FOR AN AESTHETE

  You would have loveliness in a cup and spoon,

  Fragile and brittle, perishable fine,

  Given to you by useless, servile hands

  In a politely appetizing manner.

  You might, perhaps, pause in your languid way

  To make some small remark about

  Its smooth and tepid insipidity.

  You will never feel the rush and surge of beauty

  Upon your eyes and lips and throat, never rejoice

  In the great loveliness that this earth holds,

  In the white glory of a blinding patch of sunlight

  Illuminating an unknown and hidden place,

  Never exult in a triumph over land and sea and the angels,

  Feeling the muscularity of all things,

  Or hear the chorals of the wheeling stars.

  You will only smile, and be bored, and cultivate

  A way of walking and a dinner-pose,

  And play with trifles of a flimsy wit,

  Thinking its little candle-light to be

  The flame that sears all things of earth away

  And is the shadow of Eternity.

  You will live, sipping tea, nibbling life,

  Finding the sum of beauty in a cup

  Given to you by the gracious, useless hands.

  PASTORALE NO. 2

  High wind, and spring restless in the ground.

  The earth is ribbed with water,

  vaulted with wind, peopled with motions

  of life rising in the times of the changing seasons.

  The sky blows blue and milky, March draws on

  multiplex in growth, and spring's green daughters,

  and strident with a high wind overriding rain.

  There will be new children to be born, new foison

  lifted from the creases of the ground.

  Spring lifts with a confused and shaking sound.

  Here is high wind, new spring consoling us,

  and an obscure deep restlessness in the ground.

  1

  The mountains rear, and are deathly terrifying,

  their names are trumpets in the lists of men—

  they rush up strenuously to the ghastly moon:

  high,

  and are unshaken by any sound of ours,

  resisting the nibbling picks that chip their ice,

  thunders, impregnable before the gales that race

  (wind

  tickling the cliffs of time), and the snow beats down

  in the season of snows, and the sun in another season,

  decay in autumn, and life bursting from prison

  and spring

  when the cropped grass jostles around the stunted bush,

  and the rocks split with the sound of rippling husks,

  rivulets trickle cold down, trees green, life

  is restless

  in new vigor, the brittle serpent renews itself, the fish

  makes curved sparkles leaping above the falls, death

  is given the lie once more, and life climbs

  in the ground.

  2

  Inverted torrents, fountains with strong trunks of water,

  geysers that rush away from exhausted earth—

  land straining away from matrix-land, gathering,

  shouldering up, subsiding to our familiar hills.

  Greenness rises from the soil, the shouts of waking

  arrow straight to the sun, mountains assume new pride:

  Everest, the Indian pinnacles, the Swiss magnificent Alps,

  and the American clear heights rise and deride

  conformity to earth's compulsion, the clay even bed,

  flatness, quiescence—pulling, tugging up, straining to sky,

  eager for the quick air, the moon's gleam, sun's red,

  brave and presumptuous, captains of earth. High.

  3

  A child is in the dark room where the dim lights swim,

  reflected from the living street passing below, and alone.

  And the grown people far, the few lights very dim,

  nothing present in the room but the March wind's moan;

  nothing by the bed but the rising screams of the wind,

  piercing and bleak and cold—lowering to monotone.

  In the corners of the world awaken the melted sleeping,

  forged into a bar of hardness, stiffened against the cry

  of the malevolent wind, bitterly creeping,

  and there is no escape, no way to put it by—

  music on the pipes of stone, a loud whine dripping

  into the rooms of the sleeping from the black hell of sky.

  And here, the child shudders against the blast,

  and ribbons of sound tangle, and knot, and are thinned,

  twine: and the hills shout, and the towers are cast

  with a falling noise in unearthly seas; all life is pinned

  against a bending pillar of sound, held fast,

  transfixed to an embodied shrieking. Wind.

  4

  The light tumbles in cubes, boxes of light through my window,

  there are sticks of pale light frozen on the floor—

  outside, trees glisten with convalescent brightness,

  the gleam in a healing sick man's face. (This winter tore

  the woods with sleet, crumpled long branches, pricked the sky

  with cold stars, slashed the clouds with a moon like a sickle,

  in the almost artificial fury of a late season

  hung every cornice with a fiercer icicle.)

  March follows with a bubble of drenched ground,

  washed hills, expanding earth—the massed stars sing,

  we wait the blossom of the flowing fields

  in tall grass mad with flowers. In new spring.

  5

  Microscopically, the ground moves. Dark creases in the soil

  wrinkle a garden patch. The pale stems split.

  A bud bursts into locked small leaves in the sunlight.

  Evening quivers with strange light. The night is lit.

  Streams dive down the hillsides. Fat rivers hurtle

  through the mixed greens and duns of wilderness.

  Sap stirs in maples. Laden branches swing

  slowly with new motion. Moves new loveliness.

  Life crackles the husk of earth. And no more consciousless,

  the wet and growing soil quickens, sunned, restless.

  6

  Antaeus was once strong, when his feet, locked in earth,

  made him firm and reliant. We wander and we fail,

  Not for our wandering, but that we have denied.

  The planter's hand in spring is red with clay.

  Rubble avalanches deeply in quarried sand. Our land

  is lined with the proud ores, and is fertile earth.

  The younger beasts nuzzle gladly in grasses,

  little snouted things root in the mud, are content,

  and we have learned to straddle t
he winds, and leave earth.

  O ground, O broken rock that makes us whole,

  The unborn hills, the winds that flow in the fields,

  black depths, and blinding heights, quiet and roll

  of life in the moving soil, fall, winter, spring,

  blithe summer—sudden stillness and brave sound,

  cyclical growth, green life, eternal wave,

  set our feet firmly on this mother-ground.

  A New Poem

  AN UNBORN POET

  for Alice Walker

  1

  Early, before the reservoir,

  driving up to a work day

  you see the eleven trees

  and put the poem aside

  deep in the water. For the day.

  But a word rings beside your cheek

  all day long. A bone of the poem.

  2

  A young woman stands at the door of my small room,

  a marvelous young woman, the daughter I never had,

  no poems yet, only the digging questions

  about the South, about love, about this moment.

  The woman suffering the hurt of her parents.

  The blood of her hurt eye forever rising

  a river in flood on the life of the girl,

  a girl in the North shudders, collecting blankets,

  collecting heat from where she can.

  3

  We look through our lives at each other

  after the woman's conference, at the airport.

  He sang to me (noises of the planes):

  “I'm not a woman. And I don't write poems.

  And I just. Don't. Know.”

  4

  Peddler, drowned pier, birdcage—images

  caught in your lens forever, Berenice.

  You said, “I need a light

  great as the sun. No. Greater than the sun.”

  You said, “I must invent: clothes, architecture,

  a camera that is a room, the child of

  camera obscura.”

  I went journeying in Baptista della Porta.

  I went marketing on Sixth Avenue

  and so we found the fish-head, Berenice,

  you turned his teeth to icicles,

  and his great tongue—

  I found the apple and the ear of corn.

  Twelve huge lights went off blazing at my left eye.

  Visionary lavender, flaming. Then lime-green burning. A vision of sight.

  Then blindness. Blindness. Black, returning me to night.

  5

  Working with these students. This

  returns me to the poem, returns me

  to other lives. The young woman

  comes from the South, shivering, one perfect eye

  one hurt eye, asking my friend her question:

  “Can a black person love a white person?”

  The beautiful man answers:

  “In this world, it's very hard

  for any one person to love any other person.”

  6

  I told myself coming after a long time to my poem,

  to the songs of the bodies that I met, in sleep in waking

  who are at last turning returning to this moment.

  Zora, you looked at me

  and asked me South on a journey I never went.

  “If I go with you,” I questioned in my white blackness

  “Will I pass? How will I pass, Zora?”

  “Honey,” she said, “you travellin' with me,

  don't worry, you passin'.”

  Alice, we're handed down.

  Alice, there is a road of long descent.

  Cold and shivering and something of ascent.

  7

  Early, before the huge explosions,

  Woman with her lens under the massive roadbed,

  in the stillness speaks to me, “You feel it,

  don't you? The entire city vibrating,

  causing me to tremble,

  causing my picture

  and the world to tremble.”

  And now, Berenice,

  I feel it and we feel it, huge,

  My friends go to trial, Grace, Denise,

  These energies speaking to us at last

  for evil and for life.

  8

  To the poem. Alice, you left a sheet

  of first working under the door of the small house.

  Red leaves, Africa, the house itself, were here.

  Pointing our eyes to poems,

  never again to leave,

  to hold to the poems,

  hold to simplicities.

  Alice, landscaper of grief, love, anger, bring me to birth,

  bring back my poems. No. Bring me my next poem!

  Here it is, to give to all of you.

  To do what we mean, in poetry and sex,

  to give each other what we really are.

  End of a time of intercepted music.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  The following abbreviations are used throughout the annotations and textual notes.

  29P 29 Poems

  B Berg collection

  BO Breaking Open

  BV Beast in View

  BW Body of Waking

  CP The Collected Poems (1978)

  E Elegies

  G The Gates

  GA Galley

  GW The Green Wave

  JB The Soul and Body of John Brown

  LCI Library of Congress collection, part I

  LCII Library of Congress collection, part II

  LP The Life of Poetry

  MS Manuscript

  NP “Notes for a Preface”

  O Orpheus

  OB The Outer Banks

  OL One Life

  P “Preface to the Reader”

  PP Page Proof

  S Selected Poems

  SD Speed of Darkness

  SP Selected Poems typescript (TS) and page proofs (PP), identified by catalogue number

  TF Theory of Flight

  TS Typescript

  TW A Turning Wind

  US1 U.S.1

  WF Waterlily Fire

  WI Wake Island

  WLR William L. Rukeyser personal collection

  ANNOTATIONS

  Collected Poems. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978.

  Rukeyser's “Preface to the Reader,” written for her 1978 Collected Poems, was signed “Muriel Rukeyser, New York”:

  “All the poems” is a very curious idea. Here you have a book that is like a film strip of a life in poetry: like that idea in Asia of the long body, the person seen as big-headed infant, then as reaching adolescent, then as fuller young woman, mature grown one, mother, desperate in other ways, hopeful in other ways, and so on into older life. The Collected Poems shows the movement of phases, too. Here are the early lyrics and two kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other kind informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep and sometimes—with strength of expression and skill and luck—reach that place where things are shared and we all recognize the secrets.

  Underneath all, the experience itself—a trust in the rhythms of experience.

  When I began to read, I loved the collected poems I found—they invited me through the poems of all the years of a loved poet. There were two differences then from today's books: the poets were all dead, and all were men.

  It never occurred to me that my poems would be collected until after my lifetime. The big books of my childhood were gathered from those published by one firm. My books have been issued by many publishers: I seem promiscuous, and this is chiefly because of the wanderings of my editors, as they moved from house to house. My present publisher, McGraw-Hill, is a small experimental press as far as poetry is concerned, but a great vast publishing house of science; and I care very much about that meeting-place, of science and poetry.

  In this book, all the poems are included; only the translations have been removed. The text is le
ft as it was. It seems to me that the perseverance of certain meanings and certain rhythms can be followed here, and also the changes of perception as a life and life-work go on, can be seen.

  As I read the poems in preparation for you, I saw many cuts I wanted to make; many of the large castings-forth of childhood and youth I have wanted rewritten or left out, but this is the truth of how the poems stand and how things formed for me. I do not wish to lie; many references are here without names, so as not to hurt the living and not to intrude a kind of slang of fact into poems.

  That slang is a trap of the documentary. For example, fliers do not call out “Contact!” now that planes have self-starters; but “Contact!” was the truth of that moment, and of the relation between flier and groundman. It is that toward which my poems are reaching; and I believe that poetry can extend the document. Today, too, I would change the title “Three Negresses” to “Three Black Women” in our usage and I would bring “fine black mouth” to the truer colors of nature.

  I have rectified two or three titles to those titles I have used in reading the poems to audiences.

  Only the translations have been taken out; and it now seems to me…might it not be that poetry and indeed all speech are a translation? This translation, this music, speaks to our silence. It in my childhood did, and ever since. I hope these may speak to yours, as my silence goes on speaking.

  Theory of Flight. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935.

  Rukeyser's original dedication read: “I wish here to thank Horace and Marya Gregory, Nancy Naumburg, Stephen Vincent Benet, Elizabeth Ames, Henry Fuller, Flora Rosenmeyer, and my parents, Lawrence and Myra Rukeyser.

  Rukeyser's original acknowledgments read:

  Some of these poems have appeared in Poetry, Dynamo, New Republic, New Masses, Herald-Tribune Books, The Magazine, Partisan Review, Housatonic, Trend, Vassar Review, Trial Balances, Student Outlook, Con Spirito, Kosmos, Alcestis, Student Review, Smoke, and Westminster Review.

  Stephen Vincent Benet wrote the following foreword to the 1935 Yale Series of Younger Poets edition of Theory of Flight:

  Some people are born with their craft already in their hand, and, from her first book, Miss Rukeyser seems to be one of these. There is little of the uncertainty, the fumbling, the innocently direct imitation of admirations which one unconsciously associates with a first book of verse. It is, some of it, work in a method, but the method is handled maturely and the occasional uncertainties are rather from experimentation than any technical insufficiency. Moreover, there is a great deal of power—a remarkable power for twenty-one. I don't know quite what Miss Rukeyser will do with the future but she certainly will be a writer. It sticks out all over the book.