Elegies Archives - Muriel Rukeyser Website

Originally published in A Turning Wind (1939)

As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered
the wrecked season, haunted by plans of salvage,
snow, the closed door, footsteps and resurrections,
machinery of sorrow.

The warm grass gave to the feet and the stilltide water
was floor of evening and magnetic light and
reflection of wish, the black-haired beast with my eyes
walking beside me.

The green and yellow lights, the street of water standing
point to the image of that house whose destruction
I weep when I weep you. My door (no), poems, rest,
(don’t say it!) untamable need.

When you have left the river you are a little way
nearer the lake; but I leave many times.
Parents parried my past;the present was poverty,
the future depended on my unfinished spirit.
There were no misgivings because there was no choice,
only regret for waste, and the wild knowledge:
growth and sorrow and discovery.

When you have left the river you proceed alone;
all love is likely to be illicit; and few
friends to command the soul;they are too feeble.
Rejecting the subtle and contemplative minds
as being too thin in the bone;and the gross thighs
and unevocative hands fail also. But the poet
and his wife, those who say Survive, remain;
and those two who were with me on the ship
leading me to the sum of the years, in Spain.

When you have left the river you will hear the war.
In the mountains, with tourists, in the insanest groves
the sound of kill, the precious face of peace.
And the sad frightened child, continual minor,
returns, nearer whole circle, O and nearer
all that was loved, the lake, the naked river,
what must be crossed and cut out of your heart,
what must be stood beside and straightly seen.

As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered
how the one crime is need. The man lifting the loaf
with hunger as motive can offer no alibi, is
always condemned.

These are the lines at the employment bureau
and the tense students at their examinations;
needing makes clumsy and robs them of their wish,
in one fast gesture

plants on them failure of the imagination;
and lovers who lower their bodies into the chair
gently and sternly as if the flesh had been wounded,
never can conquer.

Their need is too great, their vulnerable bodies
rigidly joined will snap, turn love away,
fear parts them, they lose their hands and voices, never
get used to the world.

Walking at night, they are asked Are you your best friend’s
best friend? and must say No, not yet, they are
love’s vulnerable, and they go down to Rotten Lake
hoping for wonders.

Dare it arrive, the day when weakness ends?
When the insistence is strong, the wish converted?
I prophesy the meeting by the water
of these desires.

I know what this is, I have known the waking
when every night ended in one cliff-dream
of faces drowned beneath the porous rock
brushed by the sea;

suffered the change : deprived erotic dreams
to images of that small house where peace
walked room to room and always with one face
telling her stories,

and needed that, past loss, past fever, and the
attractive enemy who in my bed
touches all night the body of my sleep,
improves my summer

with madness, impossible loss, and the dead music
of altered promise, a room torn up by the roots,
the desert that crosses from the door to the wall,
continual bleeding,

and all the time that will which cancels enmity,
seeks its own Easter, arrives at the water-barrier;
must face it now, biting the lakeside ground;
looks for its double,

the twin that must be met again, changeling need,
blazing in color somewhere, flying yellow
into the forest with its lucid edict:
take to the world,

this is the honor of your flesh, the offering
of strangers, the faces of cities, honor of all your wish.
I say in my own voice. These prophecies
may all come true,

out of the beaten season. I look in Rotten Lake
wait for the flame reflection, seeing only
the free beast flickering black along my side
animal of my need,

and cry I want! I want! rising among the world
to gain my converted wish, the amazing desire
that keeps me alive, though the face be still, be still,
the slow dilated heart know nothing but lack,
now I begin again the private rising,
the ride to survival of that consuming bird
beating, up from dead lakes, ascents of fire.

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

I don’t care for this new zombie renaissance. And I don’t mean that like I’m afraid of zombies or something. I just think that 1). it’s a default subject matter for horror writers, 2). all interesting scenarios and subject matters were long ago exhausted, and 3). our current fascination with the genre points to disturbing cultural predilections. So I was surprised when reading a new compilation put out by Butler University’s Pressgang Press, Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings, that my favorite story was Amiee Bender’s Among Us. Briefly, it starts as a story about a zombie that develops a taste for the decaying flesh of its fellow zombies rather than the flesh of the living. The thing that gives the story larger ramifications is how it “zooms out” to show other instants of financial, agricultural, and even domestic “cannibalism” in our society. In one of the vignettes, a salmon farm feeds bits of their own product to their product, and the meat from the salmon-fed-salmon becomes poisonous for humans to eat. Another vignette is a description of the scene from the film Being John Malkovich when said actor tumbles into his own subconscious, an example more recursive or ouroboric than cannibalistic.

Somehow, I thought of Rukeyser and the dead workers of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster. In the poem “The Cornfield” from The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser veers us off the road that led us into the poem set in the opening poem, steers us across back roads–stopping once to ask for directions–to a field where workers who died from silicosis were buried “five at a time.” The burials were hasty and covert, as Rukeyser (through George Robinson) describes in this example:

I knew a man
who died at four in the morning at the camp.
At seven his wife took clothes to dress her dead
husband, and at the undertaker’s
they told her the husband was already buried.

If we haven’t yet understood that the bodies of the dead are fertilizing the corn that we eat, just as the work that killed them provides the electricity we mindlessly use, Rukeyser compares their meager, approximate grave markers (“wood stakes, charred at tip, / few scratched and named”) with the way we might mark the produce in our backyard plots:

Think of your gardens. But here is corn to keep.
Marked pointed sticks to name the crop beneath.
Sowing is over, harvest is coming ripe.

Of course the workers are morbidly presented as our crops here, but we could interpret the chilling idea of a harvest in a positive light as well, one in which the dead are resurrected to, in a way, avenge themselves against their wrongful deaths. As the dead beneath the field cry, “Earth, uncover my blood!” Rukeyser casts her act of poesis as that uncovering. Here, the poet is a noble take on the necromancer who raises and controls the dead.

This much I understood. But one of my students connected this zombie theme to the text Rukeyser selects from the Egyptian Book of the Dead for the poem “Absolom”: “I shall journey over the earth among the living.” Although I have always read this line in a hopeful light, the student pointed out a darker interpretation, that since these men know that they have silicosis blooming in their lungs, they’re basically dead already.

I try to get my students charged up over Rukeyser by describing The Book of the Dead as “a horror poem” (“Forced through this crucible,” I shudder dramatically, “a million men!”). I’m a huge proponent for eroding the wall between genre and literary, but usually I look to the McSweeney’s crowd or to books like Pressgang’s Monsters. I admit that I don’t often look to poetry for fresh takes on sci-fi, horror, westerns, fantasy, etc. But The Book of the Dead is not the only place Rukeyser indulges in imagery traditionally associated with the horror genre. Her Elegies (1949) are full of amputation, decay, and mutilation. In “River Elegy,” she writes:

The rich streets are full of empty coats parading,
and one adolescent protesting violin,
the slums full of their flayed and faceless bodies,
they shiver, they are working to buy their skin.
They are lost.

Of the ten elegies, she alone dates this most gruesome one, Summer 1940, as if telling the reader to root it in the context of World War II. We can specifically affix the “Half-faced, half-sexed… living dead” of this elegy to victims of war, but Rukeyser is vague enough about the identity of this city “built for the half-dead and half-alive” that we are free to interpret the place as anywhere and the cause to any number of mid-century (or half-century) evils. It’s difficult not to recall Eliot’s The Wasteland:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

First Elegy: Rotten Lake

Muriel Rukeyser, Zombie Necromancer