Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Read online

out and past in a firework of signals.

  Sleepily others dangle by one hand

  tense and semi-crucified things.

  Speed welcomes us in explosions of night : here

  is wrath and fortitude and motion's burning :

  the world buries the directionless, until

  the heads are sprung in awareness or drowned in peace.

  Sleep will happen. We must give them morning.

  CHILD AND MOTHER

  for Vega Hustana

  Revolution shall be a toy of peace to you,

  children during our effort. Storm covers all our days

  the tracts of sunlight overcome with thunder

  black on this ocean and our youth going.

  Slowly our world is shaped to a new country

  for living minute fingers, the duplicated flesh :

  The old will surrender, forced under; they endure

  though dead adults walk stiffly in the street

  cramming the dead poor in their mouths for meat.

  Seashores of centuries

  all cosmic whisperings

  ripple upon this beach,

  listen until she sings

  lullaby to all sudden

  all grievous things.

  Rome fashioned you blankets

  Asia, a coverlet,

  we live for your smiling :

  sleep, we shall not forget :

  these worlds are straining

  to make your Soviet.

  Beaches of darkness! the transparent foam-lips hurrying, pouring

  spent on the margin trailing sea-currents

  mid-ocean streams : at the sand, ankle-deep

  mother with child braced in the hip's firm socket

  fronting the torrents.

  Nakedly to the extreme of the world come bathers

  advancing, the pale skin pathetic against the sea,

  untried and bare : the flesh, the bones' thin tubes

  facing dim oceans, raving hurricane, windspill,

  leviathan-tyranny.

  Child, you shall grow to follow,

  survive, and find

  wet hollow, submarine terror

  not so unkind

  as to blast strength, your eyes

  unsealed, and an armed mind.

  Child leans the dark head against protective side

  turning its look softly to the horizon

  moving its hand along the rapid wind.

  The mother knows this ocean and will tell

  clews to the young eyes' candor, fertile thoughts

  will be asserted.

  Rage, ocean : foam, oppressions,

  We stand, and these children follow, and all will yet be well.

  Chaos is split : the first slow definite strides

  are taken against the open waters ; be

  fresh growth, be confident for braveries

  we and our children meet these tides

  prows of revolt launched among barbarous seas.

  ECCENTRIC MOTION

  Dashing in glass we race,

  New York to Washington :

  encased with bubbles lie

  in emerald spa :

  upholstered promenades

  convey us far.

  Have we reached the last limits?

  What have we not done?

  Shut into velvet we

  survey the scene,

  the locked-up building,

  the frozen pier :

  before and before the events,

  we loved our minds in fear :

  they wriggle into worms.

  We watch. We turn. Surrounded,

  we are at last closed in.

  Coated in learning, do we

  cause its crown to fall?

  the plane, the bath, the car

  extend our protection :

  (But have we seen it all?

  Shall we continue

  in this direction? : )

  This is not the way

  to save the day.

  Get up and dress and go

  nobly to and fro :

  Dashing in glass we race,

  New York to Mexico….

  SUNDAYS, THEY SLEEP LATE

  The days are incestuous, each with its yesterday,

  and they, walking heavily in the streets, atone for the moment's

  sin : their memories laboring under the weight of today

  in its perverse alliance with the past. Laments

  are heard, droning from the city on all other mornings

  but Sundays, they sleep late, and need not cry to wake,

  sniffling in the pillow, realizing the day's churnings

  of minute resolving to minute, and the whole day slack,

  the wind bled of vigor, the talk in the parlor

  of people pasturing on each other's minds, and sunset

  evolving in the air, a quiet change against the duller

  signs in pandemonium of day's gradual transit:

  The klaxon voices through the roads, the picnickers joking

  (returning from the fields), who wept before they dressed.

  On Sundays their dreams are longer, and their waking

  is a long exhalation of their weeks, decompressed.

  There are these things to be remembered: the nine boys waiting,

  battle-fronts of the rising army with holes bitten by death,

  the man in the prison overland, and history beating

  out the recurrent facts of power, suppression, wrath.

  The days are incestuous. They witness the daily binding

  of minutes linking backwards. Their remembering atones

  in no part for the things they remember. They sink in blinding

  sleep too long, they dissolve in sleep their remembering bones.

  THOUSANDS OF DAYS

  Morning cried by the bed :

  at Seven I understood—

  by Eight, I was very God,

  happiness in my head.

  At Nine, I went to work,

  and all the machines spoke :

  Quiet there! Don't talk,

  make, break and make !

  At Ten, I opened my book

  and all that hour I read

  ‘The tallest men are dead,

  their graveyard's in your look….’

  I rose, angered, through sky

  in a plane of glass,

  dreaming speed, I pass

  very bright, very high.

  As it went up toward Noon

  I heard the sun scream :

  fly, suck your yellow dream,

  we'll end it soon.

  I fell all through One,

  howling and threatening,

  until at Two I sing

  of a far reunion :

  On Three the masses spread,

  a fist opening bare,

  a great hand in the square

  to vindicate the dead.

  By Four the men had gone,

  the land was wet with rain

  and a fountain stood up plain

  on every lawn.

  The clock picked at Five,

  those jets turned silver then

  with the lovely words of men

  who wrote and remained alive,

  prophesying the night

  of Six, and the dawn behind ;

  but, creeping down the wind,

  Seven snatched all the light.

  Now am I left alone

  waiting for day :

  sometimes I turn away,

  sometimes I sleep like stone.

  Midnight is on my heels,

  death bites about my legs.

  While all my courage sags

  the endless night wheels,

  danger yells, and with

  this blackness comes

  back confidence, and blooms

  in song and act and myth.

  Call off your black dog, death,

  it cannot bark me down :

  I'll travel past these wounds


  and speak another breath !

  THE SURROUNDED

  They escape before, but their shadows walk behind,

  filling the city with formidable dark,

  spilling black over the sun's run gold, speeding a rumor

  of warfare and the sciences of death, and work

  of treason and exposure, following

  me for an easy mark.

  The sky is travelled by brightness, clouds ignite,

  flame is incised upon the martyred air ;

  the city dissolves in foaming craters, stars

  falling in multitudes dazzle the sky with fire,

  and I pursue them, I am pursued, and

  they are everywhere.

  Now there is no more brightness, and no shadow

  but the shadow of a thought, and I'm in jail enough

  to know conviction with prisoner certainty,

  haunted by protest, lacking completion's proof

  surrounded by shadows

  more plausible than love.

  BURLESQUE

  Up in the second balcony

  the dark man's hand moves at his thigh,

  he turns congested eyes to floor.

  The crowd still stamps and brays for more :

  Magenta flares strip grace away

  peeling attraction down to this :

  thighs' alternation, shrugging breasts,

  silk tapping the mons veneris ;

  The adequate trough inclines and dips

  rising venereally to view :

  stained by the shifting light to blue,

  the pearl scarf simmers at her hips.

  With each contraction of desire

  the appealing flesh is whipped entire,

  ambushed in spasms.

  In the street,

  the raw light serves as index to

  upturning avid faces who

  shine all the signals of defeat.

  An army of horns moves up the hall,

  drums hurry to their crisis where

  awkward in fear, the audience

  at last confronts a dancer bare :

  these naked multitudes exposed to her :

  bright shoulders, glossy length of leg,

  the lapsing beat persists, to beg

  salving of lives of these thighs' stir.

  We are drenched in confusion, drowning among lights

  that flare across stormed waters showing here

  the faces pitiable with hesitation,

  eyes groaning past the corpse's sneer,

  the twisted words of all the unlucky, spent

  on brightened flesh of these impossible dear :

  The blemished faces and impeccable thighs

  are those we paint with lights to make us wise,

  consigning our total beauty now to this :

  the clutching loins and intolerable kiss.

  MOVIE

  Spotlight her face her face has no light in it

  touch the cheek with light inform the eyes

  press meanings on those lips.

  See cities from the air,

  fix a cloud in the sky, one bird in the bright air,

  one perfect mechanical flower in her hair.

  Make your young men ride over the mesquite plains ;

  produce our country on film : here are the flaming shrubs,

  the Negroes put up their hands in Hallelujahs,

  the young men balance at the penthouse door.

  We focus on the screen : look they tell us

  you are a nation of similar whores remember the Maine

  remember you have a democracy of champagne —

  And slowly the female face kisses the young man,

  over his face the twelve-foot female head

  the yard-long mouth enlarges and yawns

  The End

  Here is a city here the village grows

  here are the rich men standing rows on rows,

  but the crowd seeps behind the cowboy the lover the king,

  past the constructed sets America rises

  the bevelled classic doorways the alleys of trees are witness

  America rises in a wave a mass

  pushing away the rot.

  The Director cries Cut!

  hoarsely CUT and the people send pistons of force

  crashing against the CUT! CUT! of the straw men.

  Light is superfluous upon these eyes,

  across our minds push new portents of strength

  destroying the sets, the flat faces, the mock skies.

  METAPHOR TO ACTION

  Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform,

  who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words,

  whether it is the crash of lips on lips

  after absence and wanting : we must close

  the circuits of ideas, now generate,

  that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose.

  Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky,

  here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame,

  here is the man night-walking who derives

  tomorrow's manifestoes from this midnight's meeting ;

  here we require the proof in solidarity,

  iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating.

  And behind us in time are the men who second us

  as we continue. And near us is our love :

  no forced contempt, no refusal in dogma, the close

  of the circuit in a fierce dazzle of purity.

  And over us is night a field of pansies unfolding,

  charging with heat its softness in a symbol

  to weld and prepare for action our minds' intensity.

  CITATION FOR HORACE GREGORY

  These are our brave, these with their hands in on the work,

  hammering out beauty upon the painful stone

  turning their grave heads passionately finding

  truth and alone and each day subtly slain

  and each day born.

  Revolves

  a measured system, world upon world, stemmed fires

  and regulated galaxies behind the flattened head,

  behind the immortal skull, ticking eternity

  in blood and the symbols of living.

  The brass voice speaks in the street

  STRIKE STRIKE

  the nervous fingers continue elaborately

  drawing consciousness, examining, doing.

  Rise to a billboard world of Chesterfields,

  Mae West hip-wriggles, Tarzan prowess, the little

  nibbling and despicable minds.

  Here, gentlemen,

  here is our gallery of poets :

  Jeffers,

  a long and tragic drum-roll beating anger,

  sick of a catapulting nightmare world,

  Eliot, who led us to the precipice

  subtly and perfectly ; there striking an attitude

  rigid and ageing on the penultimate step,

  the thoughtful man MacLeish who bent his head

  feeling the weight of the living; bent, and turned

  the grave important face round to the dead.

  And on your left, ladies and gentlemen : poets.

  Young poets and makers, solve your anguish, see

  the brave unmedalled, who dares to shape his mind,

  printed with dignity, to the machines of change.

  A procession of poets adds one footbeat to the

  implacable metric line : the great and unbetrayed

  after the sunlight and the failing yellow,

  after the lips bitten with passion and

  gentle, after the deaths, below

  dance-floors of celebration we turn we turn

  these braveries are permanent. These gifts

  flare on our lives, clarifying, revealed.

  We are too young to see our funerals

  in pantomime nightly before uneasy beds,

  too near beginnings for this hesitation

  oblit
erated in death or carnival.

  Deep into time extend the impersonal stairs,

  established barricades will stand,

  before they die the brave have set their hand

  on rich particular beauty for their heirs.

  CATS AND A COCK

  for Eleanor Clark

  What hill can ever hold us?

  Standing high

  we saw December packed, snow upon snow,

  empty until the cars, leaping in beams below,

  opened the shadow of the trees in fans

  enormous on the plain, fragile and magnified.

  Print of the delicate branch sweeping our feet

  in hundred hugeness, passing to white again.

  Up the dark hill a pack of cats :

  bursting from hollows, streaming to the crest,

  streaming all night toward dawn

  when green invaded east.

  We stood to hear the rigid cock cry Five

  a black cock crowing over cold water,

  when all those cats found their sole proud objective

  and whirled away to slaughter.

  We walk the streets

  of the dark city,

  placards at back

  light in our heads,

  Moon rides over us

  town streams below :

  Strike and support us

  the strike-songs go.

  Ceilings of stars

  disturb our faces,

  tantrums of light

  summon our eyes;

  The daystar stands

  hungry for day :

  we file, regarding

  this twin morning.

  Shall that bind us,

  parade and planet,

  mobile and point?

  No, not yet,

  there is a labor

  before reunion.

  Poets, pickets,

  prepare for dawn!

  Come chop the days

  lop off the moving hours,

  we had not known there were disparate things.

  Forget these syntheses and fade

  peerless and distant into a distant grave

  still hoping unity indeed be made?

  I wish you to be saved…you wish…he wishes…she…

  in conjugation of a destiny.

  We were figures rubbed by wind passing upon a frieze,

  galloping figures at a column's base

  hungrily running from death and marble space.

  I give you cats : I give you a cock on a hill :

  these stream in beauty : that stands blocked in pride

  I pledge you death until

  they fight and acquiesce, or one has died.

  Earnestly and slowly I continue :

  no one could guess how the impact of a word