Waterlily Fire, 2. The Island

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

Born of this river and this rock island, I relate
The changes : I born when the whirling snow
Rained past the general’s grave and the amiable child
White past the windows of the house of Gyp the Blood.
General, gangster, child.     I know in myself the island.

I was the island without bridges, the child down whose blazing
Eye the men of plumes and bone raced their canoes and fire
Among the building of my young childhood, houses;
I was those changes, the live darknesses
Of wood, the pale grain of a grove in the fields
Over the river fronting red cliffs across—
And always surrounding her the river, birdcries, the wild
Father building his sand, the mother in panic her parks—
Bridges were thrown across, the girl arose
From sleeping streams of change in the change city.
The violent forgetting, the naked sides of darkness.
Fountain of a city in growth, and island of light and water.
Snow striking up past the graves, the yellow cry of spring.

Whatever can come to a city can come to this city.
Under the tall compulsion
                                                            of the past
I see the city
                                change like a man changing
I love this man
                                with my lifelong body of love
I know you
                                among your changes
                                                            wherever I go
Hearing the sounds of building
                                                            the syllables of wrecking
A young girl watching
                                                    the man throwing red hot rivets
Coals in a bucket of change
How can you love a city that will not stay?
I love you
                                like a man of life in change.

Leaves like yesterday shed, the yellow of green spring
Like today accepted and become one’s self
I go, I am a city with bridges and tunnels,
Rock, cloud, ships, voices.     To the man where the river met
The tracks, now buried deep along the Drive
Where blossoms like sex pink, dense pink, rose, pink, red.

Towers falling.     A dream of towers.
Necessity of fountains.     And my poor,
Stirring among our dreams,
Poor of my own spirit, and tribes, hope of towers
And lives, looking out through my eyes.
The city the growing body of our hate and love.
The root of the soul, and war in its black doorways.
A male sustained cry interrupting nightmare.
Male flower heading upstream.

Among a city of light, the stone that grows.
Stigma of dead stone, inert water, the tattered
Monuments rivetted against flesh.
Blue noon where the wall made big agonized men
Stand like sailors pinned howling on their lines, and I
See stopped in time a crime behind green glass,
Lilies of all my life on fire.
Flash faith in a city building its fantasies.

I walk past the guards into my city of change.