Poetry

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) "You are not pregnant," said the man with the probe and the white white coat; "Yes she is," said all the little animals. Then the great gynecologist examined. "You are not now, and I doubt that you ever have been," he said with authority. "Test me again." He looked at his nurse and shrugged. "Yes she is," said all the little animals, and laid down their lives for my son and me. Twenty-one years later, my son a grown man and far away at the other ocean, I hear them  :   "Yes you [...]

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads.       He smelled a familiar smell.       It was the Sphinx.       Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question. Why didn’t I recognize my mother?”        “You gave the wrong answer,” said the Sphinx.      “But that was what made everything possible,” said Oedipus.     “No,” she said. “When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man.      You didn’t [...]

Originally published in Theory of Flight (1935) :Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now? I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing. When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair : a pink rabbit : it was my birthday, and a candle burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy. :Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I will be open: Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like [...]

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' [...]