Writings

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) After you finish your work after you do your day after you've read your reading after you've written your say — you go down the street to the hot dog stand, one block down and across the way. On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century. Most of the windows are boarded up, the rats run out of a sack — sticking out of the crummy garage one shiny long Cadillac; at the glass door of the drug-addiction center, a man who'd like to break your back. But here's a brown [...]

Originally published in The Gates (1976) O for God's sakethey are connectedunderneath They look at each otheracross the glittering seasome keep a low profile Some are cliffsThe bathers thinkislands are separate like them   © Muriel Rukeyser

Originally published in Theory of Flight (1935) 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 proof in solidarity, iron on iron, [...]

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) 1 For that you never acknowledged me, I acknowledge the spring's yellow detail, the every drop of rain, the anonymous unacknowledged men and women. The shine as it glitters in our child's wild eyes, one o'clock at night. This river, this city, the years of the shadow on the delicate skin of my hand, moving in time. Disinherited, annulled, finally disacknowledged and all of my own asking. I keep that wild dimension of life and making and the spasm upon my mouth as I say this word of acknowledge to you forever. Ewig. Two [...]