Writings

J. Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) was an American scientist who spent most of his professional life at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He made award-winning contributions to the fields of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, as well as pioneering statistical mechanics. Rukeyser was deeply fascinated by Gibbs and published a biography in which she calls him a "source of power." "Gibbs" was originally published in A Turning Wind (1939) It was much later in his life he rose in the professors' room, the frail bones rising among that fume of mathematical meaning, symbols, the language of symbols, literature...threw air, simple life, [...]

Originally published in A Turning Wind (1939) It was much later in his life he rose in the professors' room, the frail bones rising among that fume of mathematical meaning, symbols, the language of symbols, literature . . . threw air, simple life, in the dead lungs of their meeting, said, "Mathematics is a language." Withdrew. Into a silent world beyond New Haven, the street-fights gone, the long youth of undergraduate riots down Church Street, initiation violence, secret societies gone : a broken-glass isolation, bottles smashed flat, windows out, street-fronts broken : to quiet, the little portico, wrought-iron and shutters' [...]

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) I lie in the bath and I contemplate the toilet-paper: Scottissue, 1000 sheets—         What a lot of pissin and shittin         What a lot of pissin and shittin Enough for the poems of Shelley and Keats— All the poems of Shelley and Keats.     (c) Muriel Rukeyser

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) In the night the sound woke us. We went up to the deck. Brightness of brightness in the black night. The ship standing still, her hold wide open. Light shining orange on the lumber her cargo, fresh strong-smelling wood. A tall elder sailor standing at the winches, his arms still, down; not seeming to move, his hands hidden behind black leather balcony. The silver-hair tall sailor, stern and serene his face turning from side to side. The winches fell and rose with the newborn wood. Orange and blazing in the lights it rose. Vancouver [...]

Originally published in Theory of Flight (1935)           1 Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry    : Not Angles, angels    :     and the magnificent past shot deep illuminations into high-school. I opened the door into the concert-hall and a rush of triumphant violins answered me while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face intruding upon Brahms.         Suddenly, in an accident the girl's brother was killed, but her father had just died    : she stood against the wall, leaning her cheek, dumbly her arms fell, "What will become of me?"    and I went into the corridor for a drink of water. These [...]

Originally published in Theory of Flight (1935) We set great wreaths of brightness on the graves of the passionate who required tribute of hot July flowers    : for you, O brittle-hearted, we bring offering remembering how your wrists were thin and your delicate bones not yet braced for conquering. The sharp cries of ghost-boys are keen above the meadows, the little girls continue graceful and wondering; flickering evening on the lakes recalls those young heirs whose developing years have sunk to earth their strength not tested, their praise unsung. Weave grasses for their childhood:     :     who will [...]

Originally published in Theory of Flight (1935) Two on the stairs in a house where they had loved     : mounting, and the steps a long ascent before them brown: a single step creaking high in the flight; the turn    : the quiet house and the cheese-yellow walls shadowed by night, dark; and the unlit lamps along the wall. Dusk piles in old house-corners rapidly.          Shade grows where corners round to flights of stairs again.          Evening accumulates under the treads of mounting stairs. They rise: he tightly-knit, clenched in anxiety, she calm, massive in female beauty, precise [...]

Originally published in Theory of Flight (1935) Here are the long fields inviolate of thought, here are the planted fields ranking the sky, signs in the earth : water-cast shuttles of light flickering the underside of rock. These have been shown before; but the fields know new hands, the son's fingers grasp warmly at the father's hoe ; there will be new ways of seeing these ancestral lands. "In town, the munitions plant has been poor since the war, And nothing but a war will make it rich again." Holy, holy, holy, sings the church next door. Time-ridden, a man [...]