Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Read online

  The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

  Edited by Janet E. Kaufman & Anne F. Herzog

  with Jan Heller Levi

  University of Pittsburgh Press

  Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260

  Copyright © 2005, Muriel Rukeyser, Janet E. Kaufman, and Anne F. Herzog

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Printed on acid-free paper

  First paperback edition, 2006

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 0-8229-5924-0

  Permissions information appears in the acknowledgments section.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8018-6 (electronic)

  For Jacob, Gabriel, Casey, and Rebecca Rukeyser

  Contents

  Editors' Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Theory of Flight (1935)

  1 - Poem Out of Childhood

  Poem Out of Childhood

  Song for Dead Children

  In a Dark House

  Effort at Speech between Two People

  Notes for a Poem

  Place-Rituals

  Tradition of This Acre

  Ritual of Blessing

  Wooden Spring

  Sonnet

  Letter, Unposted

  Sand-Quarry with Moving Figures

  Wedding Presents

  Three Sides of a Coin

  Breathing Landscape

  Four in a Family

  This House, This Country

  2 - Theory of Flight

  Preamble

  The Gyroscope

  The Lynchings of Jesus

  1 - Passage to Godhead

  2 - The Committee-Room

  3 - The Trial

  The Tunnel

  The Structure of the Plane

  1 - The Structure of the Plane

  2 - The Strike

  3 - The Lover

  Night Flight : New York

  Theory of Flight

  3 - The Blood Is Justified

  For Memory

  Life and Works

  Holy Dying

  Ritual for Death

  City of Monuments

  Study in a Late Subway

  Child and Mother

  Eccentric Motion

  Sundays, They Sleep Late

  Thousands of Days

  The Surrounded

  Burlesque

  Movie

  Metaphor to Action

  Citation for Horace Gregory

  Cats and a Cock

  The Blood Is Justified

  U.S. 1 (1938)

  1 - The Book of the Dead

  The Road

  West Virginia

  Statement: Phillippa Allen

  Gauley Bridge

  The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones

  Praise of the Committee

  Mearl Blankenship

  Absalom

  The Disease

  George Robinson: Blues

  Juanita Tinsley

  The Doctors

  The Cornfield

  Arthur Peyton

  Alloy

  Power

  The Dam

  The Disease: After-Effects

  The Bill

  The Book of the Dead

  2 - Night-Music

  A Flashing Cliff

  Girl at the Play

  Burning Bush

  Eel

  Homage to Literature

  The Handclap

  Trophies

  Panacea

  In Hades, Orpheus

  The Drowning Young Man

  Boy with His Hair Cut Short

  Course

  More of a Corpse than a Woman

  Three Black Women

  Formosa

  Night-Music

  Time Exposures

  The Child Asleep

  Adventures, Midnight

  Night-Music

  Driveway

  Lover as Fox

  Gift-Poem

  Woman and Emblems

  Woman and Bird

  The Birthday

  Woman and Music

  Outpost

  3 - Two Voyages

  The Cruise

  Mediterranean

  A Turning Wind (1939)

  1 - Moment of Proof

  Reading Time : 1 Minute 26 Seconds

  Song, the Brain-Coral

  Target Practice

  Otherworld

  Landing at Liverpool

  The Island

  Otherworld

  Nuns in the Wind

  For Fun

  Correspondences

  Democritus Laughed

  Tree of Days

  1/26/39

  Correspondences

  Noguchi

  Seventh Avenue

  The Shortest Way Home

  Palos Verdes Cliffs

  Paper Anniversary

  From the Duck-Pond to the Carousel

  Asylum Song

  The Victims, a Play for the Home

  M-Day's Child

  Speech for the Assistant, from Houdini

  Judith

  2 - Lives

  “The risen image shines, its force escapes, we are all named”

  Gibbs

  Ryder

  Chapman

  Ann Burlak

  Ives

  Wake Island (1942)

  Beast in View (1944)

  One Soldier

  1 - Beast in View

  Ajanta

  1 - The Journey

  2 - The Cave

  3 - Les Tendresses Bestiales

  4 - Black Blood

  5 - The Broken World

  Mortal Girl

  Child in the Great Wood

  The Meeting

  The Key

  Darkness Music

  Song

  Shooting Gallery

  Suicide Blues

  Wreath of Women

  Madboy's Song

  Drunken Girl

  Love and Its Doors and Windows

  The Minotaur

  Gift-Poem

  Holy Family

  Who in One Lifetime

  from “To the Unborn Child”

  Leg in a Plaster Cast

  Bubble of Air

  Sea Mercy

  Long Past Moncada

  Chapultepec Park—1

  Chapultepec Park—2

  A Game of Ball

  Gold Leaf

  All Souls

  Evening Plaza, San Miguel

  Beast in View

  2

  Letter to the Front

  1 - “Women and poets see the truth arrive”

  2 - “Even during war, moments of delicate peace”

  3 - “They called us to a change of heart”

  4 - Sestina

  5 - “Much later, I lie in a white seaport night”

  6 - “Home thoughts from home; we read you every day”

  7 - “To be a Jew in the twentieth century”

  8 - “Evening, bringing me out of the government building”

  9 - “Among all the waste there are the intense stories”

  10 - “Surely it is time for the true grace of women”

  3

  The Soul and Body of John Brown

  The Green Wave (1948)

  “Let poems and bodies love and be given to air”

  Water Night

  Eyes of Night-Time

  This Place in the Ways

  Song, from “Mr. Amazeen on the River”

  Cloud, Airs, Carried Me Away

  Salamander

  His Head Is Full of Faces

&nbs
p; Mrs. Walpurga

  A Certain Music

  The Motive of All of It

  Green Limits

  The Children's Orchard

  Christmas Eve

  Crayon House

  A Charm for Cantinflas

  Traditional Tune

  Foghorn in Horror

  Summer, the Sacramento

  Speech of the Mother, from The Middle of the Air

  Then I Saw What the Calling Was

  Translations: Six Poems by Octavio Paz

  The Bird

  Poet's Epitaph

  Spark

  Two Bodies

  The Street

  Lovers

  Rari from the Marquesas

  Rari for Tahia and Piu

  Rari for O'Otua

  A True Confession

  Careful of the Day

  Rari for Hepuheku

  Rari

  Rari to Encourage Youth

  Rari, to Be Bothered by Mosquitoes

  Not Before I Fall Asleep

  Easter Eve 1945

  Easter Eve 1945

  Private Life of the Sphinx

  Nine Poems for the unborn child

  Orpheus (1949)

  Elegies (1949)

  First Elegy. Rotten Lake

  Second Elegy. Age of Magicians

  Third Elegy. The Fear of Form

  Fourth Elegy. The Refugees

  Fifth Elegy. A Turning Wind

  Sixth Elegy. River Elegy

  Seventh Elegy. Dream-Singing Elegy

  Eighth Elegy. Children's Elegy

  Ninth Elegy. The Antagonists

  Tenth Elegy. Elegy in Joy

  Body of Waking (1958)

  1

  Haying Before Storm

  Phaneron

  The Young Girl of the Mississippi Valley

  A Birth

  King's Mountain

  Mother Garden's Round

  Rite

  Ringling

  After Their Quarrel

  Tree

  Night Feeding

  The Return

  Unborn Song

  The Two Illuminations

  F. O. M.

  Exile of Music

  On the Death of Her Mother

  “Make and be eaten, the poet says”

  Hero Speech

  The Watchers

  A Ballad Theme

  Asleep and Awake

  Of Money. And the Past.

  “Long enough. Long enough”

  The Loan

  Pouring Milk Away

  Children, the Sandbar, that Summer

  Born in December

  The Sixth Night: Waking

  Nevertheless the Moon

  Speed, We Say

  The Birth of Venus

  The Place at Alert Bay

  Voices of Waking

  Divining Water

  2 - Translations: Octavio Paz

  “The hand of day opens”

  “At daybreak go looking for your newborn name”

  Fable

  Day

  Proverbs

  “In her splendor islanded”

  “Like ivy the creeper with a thousand hands”

  Life of the Poet

  The Prisoner

  from Sun Stone

  3

  Suite for Lord Timothy Dexter

  1 - “They face us in sea-noon sun, just as he saw them waiting”

  2 - How to Impress Massachusetts

  3 - Three Nights I Dreamed

  4 - Kings and Contemporaries

  5 - The Pickle, the Temple

  6 - The Kind of Woman

  7 - Guessing Time

  4

  Are You Born?—1

  “Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters”

  “The tree of rivers seen and forgotten”

  “The power of war leads to a plan of lives”

  “A tree of rivers flowing through our lives”

  “The sea has opened, the limit of his dream”

  Powerplant

  “In the last hour of night, a zebra racing dawn”

  Fields Where We Slept

  Portrait of a Man, with a Background of Holdings

  “A red bridge fastening this city to the forest”

  “Power never dominion”

  “The sky is as black as it was when you lay down”

  “On your journey you will come to a time of waking”

  “This is the net of begetting and belief”

  Body of Waking

  “Sounds of night in the country of the opposites”

  Willkie in The Gulliver

  “Then full awake you will recognize the voice”

  “In your time, there have been those who spoke clearly”

  He Had a Quality of Growth

  Are You Born?—2

  Waterlily Fire (1962)

  The Speaking Tree

  To Enter That Rhythm Where the Self Is Lost

  For a Mexican Painter

  A Song of Another Tribe

  Song

  Waterlily Fire

  1 - The Burning

  2 - The Island

  3 - Journey Changes

  4 - Fragile

  5 - The Long Body

  The Speed of Darkness (1968)

  1 - Clues

  The Poem as Mask

  Orpheus

  What Do I Give You?

  The Transgress

  The Conjugation of the Paramecium

  Junk-Heap at Murano

  Clues

  In Our Time

  Double Dialogue:

  Homage to Robert Frost

  The Six Canons

  Forerunners

  Orgy

  The Overthrow of One O'Clock at Night

  Among Roses

  What I See

  Believing in Those Inexorable Laws

  Song : Love in Whose Rich Honor

  Niobe Now

  Song : The Star in the Nets of Heaven

  Air

  Gift

  Cries from Chiapas

  The War Comes into My Room

  Delta Poems

  Spirals and Fugues

  Anemone

  Fighting for Roses

  For My Son

  Poem

  The Power of Suicide

  The Seeming

  Song from Puck Fair

  Not Yet

  Landscape with Wave Approaching

  Segre Song

  Bunk Johnson Blowing

  Cannibal Bratuscha

  What Have You Brought Home from the Wars?

  One Month

  Silence of Volcanoes

  What They Said

  A Little Stone in the Middle of the Road, in Florida

  The Blue Flower

  Woman as Market

  Forgetting and Remembering

  Word of Mouth

  1 - The Return

  2 - Word of Mouth

  Endless

  2 - Games

  The Backside of the Academy

  Mountain : One from Bryant

  The Flying Red Horse

  3

  The Outer Banks

  4 - Lives

  Akiba

  The Way Out

  for the Song of Songs

  The Bonds

  Akiba Martyr

  The Witness

  Käthe Kollwitz

  1 - “Held between wars”

  2 - “Woman as gates, saying”

  3 - “Held among wars, watching”

  4 - Song : The Calling-Up

  5 - Self-Portrait

  5

  The Speed of Darkness

  Breaking Open (1973)

  1 - Searching / Not Searching

  Waking This Morning

  Despisals

  What Do We See?

  Looking at Each Other

  Desdichada

  Voices

  Fire

  Waiting for Icarus

  from City of Paradise

&
nbsp; The Question

  In Her Burning

  Rondel

  More Clues

  Myth

  Searching / Not Searching

  1 - “What kind of woman goes searching and searching?”

  2 - Miriam : The Red Sea

  3 - For Dolci

  4 - Concrete

  5 - Brecht's Galileo

  6 - Reading the Kieu

  7 - The Floor of Ocean

  8 - H. F. D.

  9 - The Artist as Social Critic

  10 - The President and the Laser Bomb

  11 - Not Searching

  12 - The Question

  13 - “Searching/not searching. To make closeness”

  14 - “What did I see? What did I not see?”

  A Simple Experiment

  Along History

  Boys of These Men Full Speed

  All the Little Animals

  Next

  Two Years

  Iris

  2 - Orange and Grape

  Ballad of Orange and Grape

  Rock Flow, River Mix

  Martin Luther King, Malcolm X

  Looking

  Don Baty, the Draft Resister

  Te Hanh : Long-Ago Garden

  Welcome from War

  Facing Sentencing

  Secrets of American Civilization

  Wherever

  Bringing

  A Louis Sonnet

  After Melville

  The Writer

  Gradus Ad Parnassum

  From a Play : Publisher's Song

  In the Night the Sound Woke Us

  In the Underworld

  Afterwards

  Flying to Hanoi

  It Is There

  The Running of the Grunion

  Sacred Lake

  3 - Northern Poems

  Songs of the Barren Grounds

  1 - The Old Days

  2 - Inland, Away

  3 - I'm Here Again

  4 - Not Much Good

  5 - My Breath

  I Recognize This Song

  The Black Ones, the Great Ones

  Trout Fishing

  How Lovely It Is

  The Word-Fisher

  Stroking Songs

  A Girl for a Boy—Stroking Song

  The Baby on the Mountain—Stroking Song

  The Wiping Moss from the Ruins

  Stroking Songs, Childhood Songs

  Being Born

  Shooting Star

  4

  Breaking Open

  Columbus

  Burning the Dreams

  Death and the Dancer

  Rational Man

  The Hostages

  The Gates (1976)

  1

  St. Roach

  Dream-Drumming

  Double Ode

  Painters

  Rune

  How We Did It

  Islands

  Blue Spruce

  Artifact

  Ms. Lot

  Boys in the Branches

  Song : Lying in Daylight

  Hypnogogic Figure

  The Lost Romans

  Canal

  For Kay Boyle

  Resurrection of the Right Side

  The Wards

  The Sun-Artist

  Poem White Page White Page Poem

  Fable

  Neruda, the Wine

  Before Danger