Muriel Rukeyser

These are the lines on which a committee is formed. Almost as soon as work was begun in the tunnel men began to die among dry drills. No masks. Most of them were not from this valley. The freights brought many every day from States all up and down the Atlantic seaboard and as far inland as Kentucky, Ohio. After the work the camps were closed or burned. The ambulance was going day and night, White’s undertaking business thriving and his mother’s cornfield put to a new use. “Many of the shareholders at this meeting “were nervous about the division of the profits; “How much has the Company spent on lawsuits? “The man said $150,000. Special counsel: “I am familiar with the case. Not   :   one    :    cent. “ ‘Terms of the contract. Master liable.’ “No reply. Great corporation disowning men who made. . . .” After the lawsuits had been instituted. . . . The Committee is a true reflection of the will of the people. Every man is ill. The women are not affected, This is not a contagious disease. A medical commission, Dr. Hughes, Dr. Hayhurst examined the chest of Raymond Johnson, and Dr. Harless, a former company doctor. But he saw too many die, he has written his letter to Washington. The Committee meets regularly, wherever it can. Here are Mrs. Jones, three lost sons, husband sick, Mrs. Leek, cook for the bus cafeteria, the men: George Robinson, leader and voice, four other Negroes (three drills, one camp-boy) Blankenship, the thin friendly man, Peyton the engineer, Juanita absent, the one outsider member. Here in the noise, loud belts of the shoe-repair shop, meeting around the stove beneath the one bulb hanging. They come late in the day. Many come with them who pack the hall, wait in the thorough dark. This is a defense committee. Unfinished business: Two rounds of lawsuits, 200 cases Now as to the crooked lawyers If the men had worn masks, their use would have involved time every hour to wash the sponge at mouth. Tunnel, 3⅛ miles long. Much larger than the Holland Tunnel or Pittsburgh’s Liberty Tubes. Total cost, say, $16,000,000. This is the procedure of such a committee: To consider the bill before the Senate. To discuss relief. Active members may be cut off relief, 16-mile walk to Fayetteville for cheque— west virginia relief administration, #22991 to joe henigan, gauley bridge, one and 50/100, winona national bank. paid from state funds.

:  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 music, like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me. There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing. :  Speak to me.        Take my hand.        What are you now? When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental, fluid    :    and my widowed aunt played Chopin, and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept. I want now to be close to you.        I would link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days. :  I am not happy.          I will be open. I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems. There has been fear in my life.          Sometimes I speculate On what a tragedy his life was, really. :  Take my hand.          Fist my mind in your hand.          What are you now? When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide, and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death   : if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty, if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt. I am unhappy.          I am lonely.          Speak to me. :  I will be open.          I think he never loved me: He loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls: he said with a gay mouth: I love you.          Grow to know me. :  What are you now?          If we could touch one another, if these our separate entities could come to grips, clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday I stood in a crowded street that was live with people, and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone. Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand.          Speak to me.

I. 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 o’clock at night. II. While this my day and my people are a country not yet born it has become an earth I can acknowledge.       I must.        I know what the disacknowledgment does.        Then I do take you, but far under consciousness, knowing that under under flows a river wanting the other :  to go open-handed in Asia, to cleanse the tributaries and the air, to make for making, to stop selling death and its trash, pour plastic down men’s throats, to let this child find, to let men and women find, knowing the seeds in us all.        They do say Find. I cannot acknowledge it entire.        But I will. A beginning, this moment, perhaps, and you. III. Death flowing down past me, past me, death marvelous, filthy, gold, in my spine in my sex upon my broken mouth and the whole beautiful mouth of the child; shedding power over me death if I acknowledge him. Leading me in my own body at last in the dance.

All power is saved, having no end.     Rises in the green season, in the sudden season the white the budded and the lost. Water celebrates, yielding continually sheeted and fast in its overfall slips down the rock, evades the pillars building its colonnades, repairs in stream and standing wave retains its seaward green broken by obstacle rock; falling, the water sheet spouts, and the mind dances, excess of white. White brilliant function of the land’s disease. Many-spanned, lighted, the crest leans under concrete arches and the channeled hills, turns in the gorge toward its release; kinetic and controlled, the sluice urging the hollow, the thunder, the major climax energy total and open watercourse praising the spillway, fiery glaze, crackle of light, cleanest velocity flooding, the moulded force. I open out a way over the water I form a path between the Combatants: Grant that I sail down like a living bird, power over the fields and Pool of Fire. Phoenix, I sail over the phoenix world. Diverted water, the fern and fuming white ascend in mist of continuous diffusion. Rivers are turning inside their mountains, streams line the stone, rest at the overflow lake and in lanes of pliant color lie. Blessing of this innumerable silver, printed in silver, images of stone walk on a screen of falling water in film-silver in continual change recurring colored, plunging with the wave. Constellations of light, abundance of many rivers. The sheeted island-cities, the white surf filling west, the hope, fast water spilled where still pools fed. Great power flying deep: between the rock and the sunset, the caretaker’s house and the steep abutment, hypnotic water fallen and the tunnels under the moist and fragile galleries of stone, mile-long, under the wave. Whether snow fall, the quick light fall, years of white cities fall, flood that this valley built falls slipping down the green turn in the river’s green. Steep gorge, the wedge of crystal in the sky. How many feet of whirlpools? What is a year in terms of falling water? Cylinders; kilowatts; capacities. Continuity: Σ Q = 0 Equations for falling water. The streaming motion. The balance-sheet of energy that flows passing along its infinite barrier. It breaks the hills, cracking the riches wide, runs through electric wires; it comes, warning the night, running among these rigid hills, a single force to waken our eyes. They poured the concrete and the columns stood, laid bare the bedrock, set the cells of steel, a dam for monument was what they hammered home. Blasted, and stocks went up; insured the base, and limousines wrote their own graphs upon roadbed and lifeline. Their hands touched mastery: wait for defense, solid across the world. Mr. Griswold. “A corporation is a body without a soul.” Mr. Dunn. When they were caught at it they resorted to the methods employed by gunmen, ordinary machine gun racke- teers. They cowardly tried to buy out the people who had the information on them. Mr. Marcantonio. I agree that a racket has been practised, but the most damnable racketeering that I have ever known is the paying of a fee to the very attorney who represented these victims. That is the most outrageous racket that has ever come within my knowledge. Miss Allen. Mr. Jesse J. Ricks, the president of the Union Carbide & Carbon Corporation, suggested that the stockholder had better take this question up in a private conference. The dam is safe. A scene of power. The dam is the father of the tunnel. This is the valley’s work, the white, the shining. Stock and Dividend in                                                                 Net Closing High  Low            Dollars                   Open   High   Low    Last   Chge. Bid    Ask    Sales 111   61 ¼  Union Carbide (3.20)...67 ¼   69 ½  67 ¼  69 ½   +3     69 ¼  69 ½ 3 ,400 The dam is used when the tunnel is used. The men and the water are never idle, have definitions. This is a perfect fluid, having no age nor hours, surviving scarless, unaltered, loving rest, willing to run forever to find its peace in equal seas in currents of still glass. Effects of friction : to fight and pass again, learning its power, conquering boundaries, able to rise blind in revolts of tide, broken and sacrificed to flow resumed. Collecting eternally power. Spender of power, torn, never can be killed, speeded in filaments, million, its power can rest and rise forever, wait and be flexible. Be born again. Nothing is lost, even among the wars, imperfect flow, confusion of force. It will rise. These are the phases of its face. It knows its seasons, the waiting, the sudden. It changes. It does not die.

These roads will take you into your own country. Seasons and maps coming where this road comes into a landscape mirrored in these men. Past all your influences, your home river, constellations of cities, mottoes of childhood, parents and easy cures, war, all evasion’s wishes. What one word must never be said? Dead, and these men fight off our dying, cough in the theatres of the war. What two things shall never be seen? They : what we did.     Enemy : what we mean. This is a nation’s scene and halfway house. What three things can never be done? Forget.     Keep silent.     Stand alone. The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain. The facts of war forced into actual grace. Seasons and modern glory.     Told in the histories, how first ships came seeing on the Atlantic thirteen clouds lining the west horizon with their white shining halations; they conquered, throwing off impossible Europe— could not be used to transform; created coast— breathed-in America. See how they took the land, made after-life fresh out of exile, planted the pioneer base and blockade, pushed forests down in an implacable walk west where new clouds lay at the desirable body of sunset; taking the seaboard.     Replaced the isolation, dropped cities where they stood, drew a tidewater frontier of Europe, a moment, and another frontier held, this land was planted home-land that we know. Ridge of discovery, until we walk to windows, seeing America lie in a photograph of power, widened before our forehead, and still behind us falls another glory, London unshaken, the long French road to Spain, the old Mediterranean flashing new signals from the hero hills near Barcelona, monuments and powers, parent defenses. Before our face the broad and concrete west, green ripened field, frontier pushed back like river controlled and dammed; the flashing wheatfields, cities, lunar plains grey in Nevada, the sane fantastic country sharp in the south, liveoak, the hanging moss, a world of desert, the dead, the lava, and the extreme arisen fountain of life, the flourished land, people with watercourses to California and the colored sea; sums of frontiers and unmade boundaries of acts and poems, the brilliant scene between the seas, and standing, this fact and this disease. ______________ Half-memories absorb us, and our ritual world carries its history in familiar eyes, planted in flesh it signifies its music in minds which turn to sleep and memory, in music knowing all the shimmering names, the spear, the castle, and the rose. But planted in our flesh these valleys stand, everywhere we begin to know the illness, are forced up, and our times confirm us all. In the museum life, centuries of ambition yielded at last a fertilizing image: the Carthaginian stone meaning a tall woman carries in her two hands the book and cradled dove, on her two thighs, wings folded from the waist cross to her feet, a pointed human crown. This valley is given to us like a glory. To friends in the old world, and their lifting hands that call for intercession. Blow falling full in face. All those whose childhood made learn skill to meet, and art to see after the change of heart; all the belligerents who know the world. You standing over gorges, surveyors and planners, you workers and hope of countries, first among powers; you who give peace and bodily repose, opening landscapes by grace, giving the marvel lowlands physical peace, flooding old battlefields with general brilliance, who best love your lives; and you young, you who finishing the poem wish new perfection and begin to make; you men of fact, measure our times again. _____________ These are our strength, who strike against history. These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness to our diseases; these carrying light for safety on their foreheads descended deeper for richer faults of ore, drilling their death. These touching radium and the luminous poison, carried their death on the lips and with their warning glow in their graves. These weaves and their eyes water and rust away, these stand at wheels until their brains corrode, these farm and starve, all these men cry their doom across the world, meeting avoidable death, fight against madness, find every war. Are known as strikers, soldiers, pioneers, fight on all new frontiers, are set in solid lines of defense. Defense is sight; widen the lens and see standing over the land myths of identity, new signals, processes: Alloys begin : certain dominant metals. Deliberate combines add new qualities, sums of new uses. Over the country, from islands of Maine fading, Cape Sable fading south into the orange detail of sunset, new processes, new signals, new possession. A name for all the conquests, prediction of victory deep in these powers. Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene, to photograph and to extend the voice, to speak this meaning. Voices to speak to us directly.     As we move. As we enrich, growing in larger motion, this word, this power. Down coasts of taken countries, mastery, discovery at one hand, and at the other frontiers and forests, fanatic cruel legend at our back and speeding ahead the red and open west, and this our region, desire, field, beginning.    Name and road, communication to these many men, as epilogue, seeds of unending love.

Gauley Bridge is a good town for Negroes, they let us stand around, they let us stand around on the sidewalks if we’re black or brown. Vanetta’s over the trestle, and that’s our town. The hill makes breathing slow, slow breathing after your row the river, and the graveyard’s on the hill, cold in the springtime blow, the graveyard’s up on high, and the town is down below. Did you ever bury thirty-five men in a place in back of your house, thirty-five tunnel workers the doctors didn’t attend, died in the tunnel camps, under rocks, everywhere, world without end. When a man said I feel poorly, for any reason, any weakness or such, letting up when he couldn’t keep going barely, the Cap and company come and run him off the job surely. I’ve put them DOWN from the tunnel camps to the graveyard on the hill, tin-cans all about—it fixed them!— TUNNELITIS hold themselves up at the side of a tree, I can go right now to that cemetery. When the blast went off the boss would call out, Come, let’s go back, when that heavy loaded blast went white, Come, let’s go back, telling us hurry, hurry, into the falling rocks and muck. The water they would bring had dust in it, our drinking water, the camps and their groves were colored with the dust, we cleaned our clothes in the groves, but we always had the dust. Looked like somebody sprinkled flour all over the parks and groves, it stayed and the rain couldn’t wash it away and it twinkled that white dust really looked pretty down around our ankles. As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night, with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white. The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white.

I first discovered what was killing these men. I had three sons who worked with their father in the tunnel: Cecil, aged 23, Owen, aged 21, Shirley, aged 17. They used to work in a coal mine, not steady work for the mines were not going much of the time. A power Co. foreman learned that we made home brew, he formed a habit of dropping in evenings to drink, persuading the boys and my husband — give up their jobs and take this other work. It would pay them better. Shirley was my youngest son; the boy. He went into the tunnel. My heart     my mother     my heart     my mother My heart     my coming into being.

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 woman with a little girl dressed in rose and pink, too. Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel where the hot-dog-man leans – nothing else on the counter but the usual two machines, the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty, I face him in between. A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking. I watch the man as he stands and pours in the familiar shape bright purple in the one marked ORANGE orange in the one marked GRAPE, the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE and orange drink in the GRAPE. Just the one word large and clear, unmistakeable, on each machine. I ask him : How can we go on reading and make sense out of what we read? – How can they write and believe what they're writing, the young ones across the street, while you go on pouring grape in ORANGE and orange into the one marked GRAPE –? (How are we going to believe what we read and we write and we hear and we say and we do?) He looks at the two machines and he smiles and he shrugs and smiles and pours again. It could be violence and nonviolence it could be white and black          women and men it could be war and peace or any binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend. Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don't do. On a corner in East Harlem garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape, forgetfulness, a hot street of murder, misery, withered hope, a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE and orange into the one marked GRAPE, pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.

THE WAY OUT The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man, with signs, and his journeys.     Where the rock is split and speaks to the water;     the flame speaks to the cloud; the red splatter, abstraction, on the door speaks to the angel and the constellations. The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon. And the loud hammering of the land behind speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs, we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea. All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage. Music of one child carried into the desert; firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid. Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people led by the water-drawn man to the smoke mountain. The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs, the burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening. Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain. Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child. The meaning beginning to move, which is the song. Music of those who have walked out of slavery. Into that journey where all things speak to all things refusing to accept the curse, and taking for signs the signs of all things, the world, the body which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world, all creation being created in one image, creation. This is not the past walking into the future, the walk is painful, into the present, the dance not visible as dance until much later. These dancers are discoverers of God. We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song. Out of a life of building lack on lack: the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith: an army who came to the ocean: the walkers who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou, city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo, the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes, swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March: all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man. Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world. Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death by his disciples carried from Jerusalem in blackness journeying to find his journey to whatever he was loving with his life. The wilderness journey through which we move under the whirlwind truth into the new, the only accurate. A cluster of lights at night: faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in. Barbarian music, a new song. Acknowledging opened water, possibility: open like a woman to this meaning. In a time of building statues of the stars, valuing certain partial ferocious skills while past us the chill and immense wilderness spreads its one-color wings until we know rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea, the world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find. What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey. Ways to discover. The song of the way in.