Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Read online

  Air mocks, and desire whirls outward in strict frenzy, leaping,

  elastic circles widening from the mind,

  turning constricted to the mind again.

  The dynamics of desire are explained

  in terms of action outward and reaction to a core

  obscured and undefined, except, perhaps, as “God in Heaven,” “God in Man,”

  Elohim intermittent with the soul, recurrent

  as Father and Holy Ghost, Word and responsive Word,

  merging with contact in continual sunbursts,

  the promise, the response, the hands laid on,

  the hammer swung to the anvil, mouth fallen on mouth,

  the plane nose up into an open sky.

  Roads are cut, purchase is gained on our wish,

  the turbines gather momentum, tools are given :

  whirl in desire, hurry to ambition, return,

  maintaining the soul's polarity ; be : fly.

  THE LYNCHINGS OF JESUS

  1 PASSAGE TO GODHEAD

  Passage to godhead, fitfully glared upon

  by bloody shinings over Calvary

  this latest effort to revolution stabbed

  against a bitter crucificial tree,

  mild thighs split by the spearwound, opening

  in fierce gestation of immortality.

  Icarus' phoenix-flight fulfils itself,

  desire's symbol swings full circle here,

  eternal defeat by power, eternal death

  of the soul and body in murder or despair

  to be followed by eternal return, until

  the thoughtful rebel may triumph everywhere.

  Many murdered in war, crucified, starved,

  loving their lives they are massacred and burned,

  hating their lives as they have found them, but

  killed while they look to enjoy what they have earned,

  dismissed with peremptory words and hasty graves,

  little calm tributes of the unconcerned.

  Bruno, Copernicus, Shelley, Karl Marx : you

  makers of victory for us : how long?

  We love our lives, and the crucifixions come,

  benevolent bugles smother rebellion's song,

  blowing protection for the acquiescent,

  and we need many strengths to continue strong.

  Tendons bind us to earth, Antaeus-ridden

  by desperate weakness disallied from ground,

  bone of our bone; and the sky's plains above us

  seduce us into powers still unfound,

  and freedom's eagles scream above our faces,

  misleading, sly, perverse, and unprofound.

  Passage to godhead, shine illuminated

  by other colors than blood and fire and pride.

  Given wings, we looked downward on earth, seen

  uniform from distance; and descended, tied

  to the much-loved near places, moved to find

  what numbers of lynched Jesuses have not been deified.

  2 THE COMMITTEE-ROOM

  Let us be introduced to our superiors, the voting men.

  They are tired ; they are hungry ; from deciding all day

  around the committee-table.

  Is it foggy outside? It must be very foggy

  The room is white with it.

  The years slope into a series of nights, rocking sea-like,

  shouting a black rush, enveloping time and kingdom

  and the flab faces

  Those people engendered my blood swarming

  over the altar to clasp the scrolls and Menorah

  the black lips, bruised cheeks, eye-reproaches :

  as the floor burns, singing Shema

  Our little writers go about, hurrying the towns along,

  running from mine to luncheon, they can't afford

  to let one note escape their holy jottings:

  today the mother died, festering : he shot himself : the bullet entered

  the roof of the mouth, piercing the brain-pan

  How the spears went down in a flurry of blood;

  how they died howling

  how the triumph marched

  all day and all night past the beleaguered town

  blowing trumpets at the fallen towers;

  how they pulled their shoulders over the hill, crying

  for the whole regiment to hear The Sea The Sea

  Our young men opening the eyes and mouths together,

  facing the new world with their open mouths

  gibbering war

  gibbering conquest

  Ha. Will you lead us to discovery?

  What did you do in school today, my darling?

  Tamburlaine rode over Genghis had a sword

  holding riot over Henry V Emperor of and

  the city of Elizabeth the tall sails

  crowding England into the world and Charles

  his head falling many times onto a dais

  how they have been monarchs and

  Calvin Coolidge who wouldn't say

  however, America

  All day we have been seated around a table

  all these many days

  One day we voted on whether he was Hamlet

  or whether he was himself and yesterday

  I cast the deciding vote to renounce our mouths.

  Today we sentinel the avenue solemnly warning

  the passers (who look the other way, and cough) that we

  speak with the mouths of demons, perhaps the people's,

  but not our own.

  Tomorrow

  the vote's to be cast on the eyes, and sex, and brain.

  Perhaps we will vote to disavow all three.

  We are powerful now : we vote

  death to Sacco a man's name

  and Vanzetti a blood-brother; death

  to Tom Mooney, or a wall, no matter;

  poverty to Piers Plowman, shrieking anger

  to Shelley, a cough and Fanny to Keats;

  thus to Blake in a garden; thus to Whitman;

  thus to D. H. Lawrence.

  And to all you women,

  dead and unspoken-for, what sentences,

  to you dead children, little in the ground

  all you sweet generous rebels, what sentences

  This is the case of one Hilliard, a native of Texas,

  in the year of our Lord 1897, a freeman.

  Report…Hilliard's power of endurance seems to be

  the most wonderful thing on record. His lower limbs

  burned off a while before he became unconscious;

  and his body looked to be burned to the hollow.

  Was it decreed (oh coyly coyly) by an avenging God

  as well as an avenging people that he suffer so?

  We have

  16 large views under magnifying glass.

  8 views of the trial and the burning.

  For place of exhibit watch the street bills.

  Don't fail to see this.

  Lie down dear, the day was long, the evening is smooth.

  The day was long, and you were voting all day

  hammering down these heads

  tamping the mould about these diamond eyes

  filling the mouths with wax

  lie down my dear

  the bed is soft lie down to kindest dreams

  all night they carried leaves

  bore songs and garlands up the gradual hill

  the noise of singing kept the child awake

  but they were dead

  all Shakespeare's heroes the saints the Jews the rebels

  but the noise stirred their graves' grass

  and the feet all falling in those places

  going up the hill with sheaves and tools

  and all the weapons of ascent together.

  3 THE TRIAL

  The South is green with coming spring ; revival

  flourishes in the fields of Alabama. Spongy with rain,

  plantations breath
e April : carwheels suck mud in the roads,

  the town expands warm in the afternoons. At night the black boy

  teeters no-handed on a bicycle, whistling The St. Louis Blues,

  blood beating, and hot South. A red brick courthouse

  is vicious with men inviting death. Array your judges; call your

  jurors; come,

  here is your justice, come out of the crazy jail.

  Grass is green now in Alabama; Birmingham dusks are quiet

  relaxed and soft in the park, stern at the yards:

  a hundred boxcars shunted off to sidings, and the hoboes

  gathering grains of sleep in forbidden corners.

  In all the yards : Atlanta, Chattanooga,

  Memphis, and New Orleans, the cars, and no jobs.

  Every night the mail-planes burrow the sky,

  carrying postcards to laughing girls in Texas,

  passionate letters to the Charleston virgins,

  words through the South : and no reprieve,

  no pardon, no release.

  A blinded statue attends before the courthouse,

  bronze and black men lie on the grass, waiting,

  the khaki dapper National Guard leans on its bayonets.

  But the air is populous beyond our vision:

  all the people's anger finds its vortex here

  as the mythic lips of justice open, and speak.

  Hammers and sickles are carried in a wave of strength, fire-tipped,

  swinging passionately ninefold to a shore.

  Answer the back-thrown Negro face of the lynched, the flat

  forehead knotted,

  the eyes showing a wild iris, the mouth a welter of blood,

  answer the broken shoulders and these twisted arms.

  John Brown, Nat Turner, Toussaint stand in this courtroom,

  Dred Scott wrestles for freedom there in the dark corner,

  all our celebrated shambles are repeated here : now again

  Sacco and Vanzetti walk to a chair, to the straps and rivets

  and the switch spitting death and Massachusetts' will.

  Wreaths are brought out of history

  here are the well-nourished flowers of France, grown strong on blood,

  Caesar twisting his thin throat toward conquest, turning

  north from the Roman laurels,

  the Istrian galleys slide again to sea.

  How they waded through bloody Godfrey's Jerusalem !

  How the fires broke through Europe, and the rich

  and the tall jails battened on revolution !

  The fastidious Louis', cousins to the sun, stamping

  those ribboned heels on Calas, on the people;

  the lynched five thousand of America.

  Tom Mooney from San Quentin, Herndon : here

  is an army for audience

  all resolved

  to a gobbet of tobacco, spat, and the empanelled hundred,

  a jury of vengeance, the cheap pressed lips, the narrow eyes like

  hardware;

  the judge, his eye-sockets and cheeks dark and immutably secret,

  the twisting mouth of the prosecuting attorney.

  Nine dark boys spread their breasts against Alabama,

  schooled in the cells, fathered by want.

  Mother : one writes : they treat us bad. If they send us

  back to Kilby jail, I think I shall kill myself.

  I think I must hang myself by my overalls.

  Alabama and the South are soft with spring;

  in the North, the seasons change, sweet April, December and the air

  loaded with snow. There is time for meetings

  during the years, they remaining in prison.

  In the Square

  a crowd listens, carrying banners.

  Overhead, boring through the speaker's voice, a plane

  circles with a snoring of motors revolving in the sky,

  drowning the single voice. It does not touch

  the crowd's silence. It circles. The name stands :

  Scottsboro

  Earth, include sky ; air, be stable to our

  feet, which have need of stone and iron stance;

  all opposites, affirm your contradictions,

  lead, all you prophets, our mechanic dance.

  Arches over the earth, conform, be still,

  calm Roman in the evening cool of grace,

  dramatic Gothic, be finally rounded now

  pared equal to the clean savannahs of space,

  grind levels to one plane, unfold the stones

  that shaped you pointed, return to ground, return,

  bird be no more a brand upon the sky

  no more a torch to which earth's bodies burn

  fire attracting fire in magnetism

  too subtle for dissection and proponence,

  torturing fire, crucifying posture

  with which dead Jesus quenches his opponents.

  Shall we then straddle Jesus in a plane

  the rigid crucified revived at last

  the pale lips flattened in a wind a rain

  of merging conquered blast and counterblast.

  Shout to us : See !

  the wind !

  Shout to us :

  FLY

  THE TUNNEL

  1

  NO WORK is master of the mine today

  tyrant that walks with the feet of murder here

  under his cracked shoes a grass-blade dusted

  dingy with coal's smear.

  The father's hand is rubbed with dust, his body

  is witness to coal, black glosses all his skin.

  Around the pithead they stand and do not talk

  looking at the obvious sign.

  Behind his shoulder stands the black mountain

  of unbought coal, green-topped with grass growing

  rank in the shag, as if coal were native earth

  and the top a green snowing

  down on the countryside. In the whole valley

  eleven mines, and five of them are closed,

  two are on strike, but in the others, workers

  scramble down the shafts, disposed

  to grub all day and all night, lording it

  in the town because of their jobs and their bosses

  at work with all the other mines' graveyards.

  These are the valley's losses

  which even the company fails to itemize

  in stubborn black and red in the company stores :

  the empty breasts like rinds, the father's hands,

  the sign, the infected whores,

  a puppy roasted for pregnant Mary's dinner…

  On the cold evenings the jobless miners meet

  wandering dully attracted to the poolroom,

  walking down the grey street.

  “Well,” says the father, “nothing comes of this,

  the strippings run to weeds, the roads all mucked.

  A dead mine makes dead miners. God, but I

  was a fool not to have chucked

  the whole damned ruin when I was a kid.”

  “And how'd you have a chance to throw it over?”

  “Well,” he said, “if I hadn't married : though then

  the place had more in its favor.

  Babies came quickly after summertimes.

  You could work, and quit, and get a better job.

  God knows if it'll ever be the same,

  or if ever they'll think not to rob,

  not to cut wages, not to weigh us short.”

  “All right,” the other says, “maybe God does.

  We'll be a long time dead, come that time, buried

  under coal where our life was;

  we were children and did not know our childhood,

  we got infants, and never knew our wives,

  year in and out, seeing no color but coal,

  we were the living who could not have their lives.”

  2

&n
bsp; Emerge, city, from your evening : allay me, sleep :

  but the city withdraws to night, sleep passes whitely

  inanely over my eyelids mockcomforting pale dawn's

  developing silver and I unloved.

  Shall we no more, my love, pass down the lanes of grace

  slowly together and in each other's safekeeping, no more

  shall I watch evening touch hands to your face

  and feel myself glisten in answer?

  Day shines a last gloom quickening the street, and deep

  grave-deep the subway files down space to a moment

  over me a plane exterminates distance ; you

  are unalterably removed : day touches you

  nor night though tiger it may rage abroad ; you are

  beyond its claws, if my love will not reach you.

  O love, how am I surpassed how mocked how

  defiled and corroded untouched by your kiss.

  I came to you riding on love with love in my hands, advancing

  seaworn, hearing far bells : you have been a prow

  carving a tragic sea to meet my love, you have been lamps

  burning all night over tired waters.

  You have been stone set upon fine-grained woods, buildings

  of granite standing in a street of stone, roads

  full of fallen flowers wet under the foot, ships

  pointing an index to voyage among islands,

  blue archipelagoes : your body being an island

  set about with magnetic flowers and flesh and fruit :

  the sons I might bear you, the sons, the fragrant daughters.

  Intrudes on this the bleak authentic voice :

  wherefore does the mouth stiffen, the cheeks freeze austere

  as stone, affording special grief among the days

  and cold days catalogued of comfort murdered,

  the iron passage, estranged eyes, and the death

  of all my logic : pale with the weakness of one

  dead and not yet arisen, a hollow bath of flame

  with my fire low along the oils of grace

  how many deaths, body so torn from spirit.

  Body, return : I love you : soul, come home!

  I am gone down to death in a great bleeding.

  All day the bleeding washes down my sides ; at night

  darkly and helplessly my face is wet.

  Open me a refuge where I may be renewed. Speak to me

  world hissing over cables, shining among steel strands,

  plucking speech out on a wire, linking voices,

  reach me now in my fierceness, or I am drowned

  buried among my flesh, dead of a dead desire.

  All night I went to the places of my love,

  opened to one wished meeting, all unarmed.

  And there was nothing but machine-loud streets.