The Muriel Rukeyeser Living Archive
Originally published in The Speed of Darkness (1968)
You are looking into me with your waking look.
My eyes are closing, my eyes are opening
My mouth is closing, my mouth is opening.
You are waiting with your red promises.
My sex is closing, my sex is opening.
You are singing and offering : the way in.
My life is closing, my life is opening.
You are here.
Originally published in The Gates (1976)
For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
water on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.
Not like me.
For that I did not know your poems
And that I do not know any of your sayings
And that I cannot speak or read your language
And that I do not sing your songs
And that I do not teach our children
to eat your food
or know your poems
or sing your songs
But that we say you are filthing our food
But that we know you not at all.
Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.
You were lighter than the others in color, that was
neither good nor bad.
I was really looking for the first time.
You seemed troubled and witty.
Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were startled, you ran, you fled away
Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.
(c) Muriel Rukeyser
Originally Published in A Turning Wind (1939)
The fear of poetry is the
fear : mystery and fury of a midnight street
of windows whose low voluptuous voice
issues, and after that there is no peace.
The round waiting moment in the
theatre : curtain rises, dies into the ceiling
and here is played the scene with the mother
bandaging a revealed son’s head. The bandage is torn off.
Curtain goes down. And here is the moment of proof.
That climax when the brain acknowledges the world,
all values extended into the blood awake.
Moment of proof. And as they say Brancusi did,
building his bird to extend through soaring air,
as Kafka planned stories that draw to eternity
through time extended. And the climax strikes.
Love touches so, that months after the look of
blue stare of love, the footbeat on the heart
is translated into the pure cry of birds
following air-cries, or poems, the new scene.
Moment of proof. That strikes long after act.
They fear it. They turn away, hand up, palm out
fending off moment of proof, the straight look, poem.
The prolonged wound-consciousness after the bullet’s shot.
The prolonged love after the look is dead,
the yellow joy after the song of the sun.
(c) Muriel Rukeyser
Originally published in The Speed of Darkness (1968)
You come from poets, kings, bankrupts, preachers,
attempted bankrupts, builders of cities, salesmen,
the great rabbis, the kings of Ireland, failed drygoods
storekeepers, beautiful women of the songs,
great horsemen, tyrannical fathers at the shore of ocean,
the western mothers looking west beyond from
their windows,
the families escaping over the sea hurriedly and by
night–
the roundtowers of the Celtic violet sunset,
the diseased, the radiant, fliers, men thrown out of
town, the man bribed by his cousins to stay out of
town, teachers, the cantor on Friday evening, the
lurid newspapers,
strong women gracefully holding relationship, the
Jewish girl going to parochial school, the boys
racing their iceboats on the Lakes,
the woman still before the diamond in the velvet
window, saying “Wonder of nature.”
Like all men,
you come from singers, the ghettoes, the famines, wars
and refusal of wars, men who built villages
that grew to our solar cities, students, revolutionists, the
pouring of buildings, the market newspapers,
a poor tailor in a darkening room,
a wilderness man, the hero of mines, the astronomer, a
white-faced woman hour on hour teaching piano
and her crippled wrist,
like all men,
you have not seen your father’s face
but he is known to you forever in song, the coast of the
skies, in dream, wherever you find man playing
his part as father, father among our light, among
our darkness,
and in your self made whole, whole with yourself and
whole with others,
the stars your ancestors.
(c) Muriel Rukeyser
Originally published in Breaking Open (1973)
Waking this morning,
a violent woman in the violent day
Laughing.
Past the line of memory
along the long body of your life
in which move childhood, youth, your lifetime of touch,
eyes, lips, chest, belly, sex, legs, to the waves of the sheet.
I look past the little plant
on the city windowsill
to the tall towers bookshaped, crushed together in greed,
the river flashing flowing corroded,
the intricate harbor and the sea, the wars, the moon, the
planets, all who people space
in the sun visible invisible.
African violets in the light
breathing, in a breathing universe. I want strong peace,
and delight,
the wild good.
I want to make my touch poems:
to find my morning, to find you entire
alive moving among the anti-touch people.
I say across the waves of the air to you:
today once more
I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking the world away
in the violent day.
(c) Muriel Rukeyser
First published in The Speed of Darkness (1968)
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
(c) Muriel Rukeyser
Originally published in The Speed of Darkness (1968)
is my concern. That’s the moment,
when I lean on my elbows out the windowsill
and feel the city among its time-zones, among its seas,
among its late night news, the pouring in
of everything meeting, wars, dreams, winter night.
Light in snowdrifts causing the young girls
lying awake to fall in love tonight
alone in bed; or the little children
half world over tonight rained on by fire–that’s us–
calling on somebody–that’s us–to come
and help them.
Now I see at the boundary of darkness
extreme of moonlight.
Alone. All my hopes
scattered in people quarter world away
half world away, out of all hearing.
Tell myself:
Trust in experience. And in the rhythms.
The deep rhythms of your experience.
(c) Muriel Rukeyser
Originally published in Breaking Open (1973)
I come into the room The room stands waiting
river books flowers you are far away
black river a language just forgotten
traveling blaze of light dreams of endurance
racing into this moment outstretched faces
and you are far away
The stars cross over
fire-flood extremes of singing
filth and corrupted promises my river
A white triangle of need
my reflected face
laced with a black triangle of need
Naked among the silent of my own time
and Zig Zag Zag that last letter
of a secret or forgotten alphabet
shaped like our own last letter but it means
Something in our experience you do not know
When will it open open opening
River-watching all night
will the river
swing open we are Asia and New York
Bombs, roaches, mutilation River-watching
Looking out at the river
the city-flow seen as river
the flow seen as a flow of possibility
and I too to that sea.
Summer repetitive. The machine screaming
Beating outside, on the corrupted
Waterfront.
On my good days it appears digging
And building,
On others, its monstrous word
Says on one note Gone, killed, laid waste.
The whole thing—waterfront, war, city,
sons, daughters, me—
Must be re-imagined.
Sun on the orange-red roof.
Walking into the elevator at Westbeth
Yelling in the empty stainless-steel
Room like the room of this tormented year.
Like the year
The metal nor absorbs nor reflects
My yelling.
My pulled face looks at me
From the steel walls.
And then we go to Washington as it if were
Jerusalem;
and then we present our petition, clearly,
rightfully;
and then some of us walk away;
and then do others of us stay;
and some of us lie gravely down
on that cool mosaic floor,
the Senate.
Washington! Your bombs rain down!
I mourn, I lie down, I grieve.
Written on the plane:
The conviction that what is meant by the unconscious is the same
as what is meant by history. The collective unconscious is the living
history brought to the present in consciousness, waking or sleeping.
The personal “unconscious” is the personal history. This is an
identity.
We will now explore further ways of reaching our lives, the new
world. My own life, yours; this earth, this moon, this system, the
“space” we share, which is consciousness.
Turbulence of air now. A pause of nine minutes.
Written on the plane. After turbulence:
The movement of life : to live more fully in the present. This
movement includes the work of bringing this history to “light” and
understanding. The “unconscious” of the race, and its traces in art
and in social structure and “inventions” — these are our inheritance.
In facing history, we look at each other, and in facing our entire
personal life, we look at each other.
I want to break open. On the plane, a white cloud seen through
rainbow. The rainbow is, optically, on the glass of the window.
The jury said Guilty, Guilty, Guilty,
Guilty, Guilty. Each closed face.
I see myself in the river-window. River
Slow going to its sea.
An old, crushed, perverse, waiting,
In loss, in dread, dead tree.
COLUMBUS
Inner greet. Greenberg said it,
Even the tallest man needs inner greet.
This is the great word
brought back, in swinging seas. The new world.
End of summer.
Dark-red butterflies on the river
Dark-orange butterflies in the city.
The young men still going to war
Or away from war, to the prisons, to other countries.
To the high cold mountains, to the source of the river, I too go,
Deeper into this room.
A dream remembered only in other dreams.
The voice saying:
All you dreaded as a child
Came to pass in storms of light;
All you dreaded as a girl
Falls and falls in avalanche—
Dread and the dream of love will make
All that time and men may build,
All that women dance and make.
They become you. Your own face
Dances through the night and day,
Leading your body into this
Body-led dance, its mysteries.
Answer me. Dance my dance.
River-watching from the big Westbeth windows:
Powerful miles of Hudson, an east-blowing wind
All the way to Asia.
No. Lost in our breath,
Sobbing, lost, alone. The River darkens.
Black flow, bronze lights, white lights.
Something must answer that light, that dark.
Love,
The door opens, you walk in.
The old man said, “The introversion of war
Is the main task of our time.”
Now it makes its poems, when the sky stops killing.
I try to turn my acts inward and deeper.
Almost a poem. If it splash outside,
All right.
My teacher says, “Go deeper.”
The day when the salmon-colored flowers
Open.
I will essay. Go deeper.
Make my poem.
Going to prison. The clang of the steel door.
It is my choice. But the steel door does clang.
The introversion of this act
Past its seeming, past all thought of effect,
Until it is something like
Writing a poem in my silent room.
In prison, the thick air,
still, loaded, heat on heat.
Around your throat
for the doors are locks,
the windows are locked doors,
the hot smell locked around us,
the machine shouting at us,
trying to sell us meat and carpets.
In prison, the prisoners,
all of us, all the objects,
chairs, cots, mops, tables.
Only the young cat.
He does not know he is locked in.
In prison, the prisoners.
One black girl, 19 years.
She has killed her child
and she grieves, she grieves.
She crosses to my bed.
“What do Free mean?”
I look at her.
“You don’t understand English.”
“Yes, I understand English.”
“What do Free mean?”
In prison a
brown paper bag
I put it beside my cot.
All my things.
Comb, notebook, underwear,
letterpaper, toothbrush, book.
I am rich—
they have given me another toothbrush.
The guard saying:
“You’ll find people share here.”
Photos, more precise than any face can be.
The broken static moment, life never by
any eye seen.
My contradictions set me tasks, errands.
This I know:
What I reap, that shall I sow.
How we live:
I look into my face in the square glass.
Under it, a bright flow of cold water.
At once, a strong arrangement of presences:
I am holding a small glass
under the little flow
at Fern Spring, among the western forest.
A cool flaw among the silence.
The taste of the waterfall.
Some rare battered she-poet, old girl in the Village
racketing home past low buildings some freezing night,
come face to face with that broad roiling river.
Nothing buried in her but is lit and transformed.
BURNING THE DREAMS
on a spring morning of young wood, green wood
it will not burn, but the dreams burn.
My hands have ashes on them.
They fear it
and so they destroy the nearest things.
DEATH AND THE DANCER
Running from death
throwing his teeth at the ghost
dipping into his belly, staving off death with a throw
tearing his brains out, throwing them at Death
death-baby is being born
scythe clock and banner come
trumpet of bone and drum made of something—
the callous-handed goddess
her kiss is resurrection
RATIONAL MAN
The marker at Auschwitz
The scientists torturing male genitals
The learned scientists, they torture female genitals
The 3-year-old girl, what she did to her kitten
The collar made of leather for drowning a man in his chair
The scatter-bomb with the nails that drive into the brain
The thread through the young man’s splendid penis
The babies in flames. The thrust
Infected reptile dead in the live wombs of girls
We did not know we were insane.
We do not know we are insane.
We say to them : you are insane
Anything you can imagine
on punishable drugs, or calm and young
with a fever of 105, or on your knees,
with the word of Hanoi bombed
with the legless boy in Bach Mai
with the sons of man torn by man
Rational man has done.
Mercy, Lord. On every living life.
In tall whirlpools of mirrors
Unshapen body and face
middle of the depth
of a night that will not turn
the unshapen all night
trying for form
I do and I do.
Life and this under-war.
Deep under protest, make.
For we are makers more.
but touching teaching going
the young and the old
they reach they break they are moving
to make the world
something about desire
something about murder
something about my death
something about madness
something about light
something of breaking open
sing me to sleep and morning
my dreams are all a waking
In the night
wandering room to room of this world
I move by touch
and then something says
let the city pour
the sleep of the beloved
Let the night pour down
all its meanings
Let the images pour
the light is dreaming
THE HOSTAGES
When I stand with these three
My new brothers my new sister
These who bind themselves offering
Hostages to go at a word, hostages
to go deeper here among our own cities
When I look into your faces
Karl, Martin, Andrea.
When I look into your faces
Offered men and women, I can speak,
And I speak openly on the church steps,
At the peace center saying : We affirm
Our closeness forever with the eyes in Asia,
Those who resist the forces we resist.
One more hostage comes forward, his eyes: Joe,
With Karl, Martin, Andrea, me.
And now alone in the river-watching room,
Allen, your voice comes, the deep prophetic word.
And we are one more, Joe, Andrea, Karl, Martin,
Allen, me. The hostages. Reaching. Beginning.
That I looked at them with my living eyes.
That they looked at me with their living eyes.
That we embraced.
That we began to learn each other’s language.
It is something like the breaking open of my youth
but unlike too, leading not only to consummation
of the bed and of the edge of the sea.
Although that, surely, also.
But this music is
itself
needing only other selving
It is defeated but a way is open:
transformation
Then came I entire to this moment
process and light
to discover the country of our waking
breaking open
(c) Muriel Rukeyser