More on Monet’s Waterlilies.
I’ve always loved Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Waterlily Fire,” never realizing it
refers to an actual fire at MOMA in 1958 that destroyed the large
“Waterlilies,” (below) which the museum had acquired a year before. The cause, as
reported in the Times, was construction workers smoking near paint and sawdust.
Hear Rukeyser read here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241684
Rukeyser’s Endnote for
“Waterlily Fire”
The time of this poem is the period in New York City
from April, 1958, when I witnessed the destruction of Monet’s Waterlilies
by fire at the Museum of Modern Art, to the present moment.
The two spans of time assumed are the history of
Manhattan Island and my lifetime on the island. I was born in an apartment
house that had as another of its tenants the notorious gangster Gyp the Blood.
Nearby was Grant’s Tomb and the grave of the Amiable Child. This child died
very young when this part of New York was open country. The place with its
memory of amiability has been protected among all the rest. My father, in the
building business, made us part of the building, tearing down, and rebuilding
of the city, with all that that implies. Part II is based on that time, when
building still meant the throwing of red-hot rivets, and only partly the
pouring of concrete of the later episodes.
Part IV deals with an actual television interview with
Suzuki, the Zen teacher, in which he answered a question about a most important
moment in the teaching of Buddha.
The long body of Part V is an idea from India of one’s
lifetime body as a ribbon of images, all our changes seen in process.
The
“island of people” was the group who stayed out in the open in City Hall Park
in April of 1961, while the rest of the city took shelter at the warning sound
of the sirens. The protest against this nuclear-war practice drill was, in
essence, a protest against war itself and an attempt to ask for some other way
to deal with the emotions that make people make war.
Before the Museum of Modern Art was built, I worked for
a while in the house that then occupied that place. On the day of the fire, I
arrived to see it as a place in the air. I was coming to keep an appointment
with my friend the Curator of the Museum’s Film Library, Richard Griffith, to
whom this poem is dedicated.
The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed.
Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2005), p. 620
Waterlily Fire
for Richard Griffith
1 THE
BURNING
Girl grown
woman fire mother of fire
I go to the
stone street turning to fire. Voices
Go
screaming Fire to the green
glass wall.
And there
where my youth flies blazing into fire
The
dance of sane and insane images, noon
Of seasons
and days. Noontime of my one hour.
Saw down the
bright noon street the crooked faces
Among the
tall daylight in the city of change.
The scene
has walls stone
glass all my gone life
One wall a
web through which the moment walks
And I am
open, and the opened hour
The world as
water-garden lying behind it.
In a city of
stone, necessity of fountains,
Forces water
fallen on glass, men with their axes.
An arm of
flame reaches from water-green glass,
Behind the
wall I know waterlilies
Drinking
their light, transforming light and our eyes
Skythrown
under water, clouds under those flowers,
Walls
standing on all things stand in a city noon
Who will not
believe a waterlily fire.
Whatever can
happen in a city of stone,
Whatever can
come to a wall can come to this wall.
I walk in
the river of crisis toward the real,
I pass
guards, finding the center of my fear
And you,
Dick, endlessly my friend during storm.
The arm of
flame striking through the wall of form.
2 THE
ISLAND
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.
3
JOURNEY CHANGES
Many of
us Each in his own life waiting
Waiting to
move Beginning to move Walking
And early on
the road of the hill of the world
Come to my
landscapes emerging on the grass
The stages
of the theatre of the journey
I see the
time of willingness between plays
Waiting and
walking and the play of the body
Silver body
with its bosses and places
One by one
touched awakened into into
Touched and
turned one by one into flame
The theatre
of the advancing goddess Blossoming
Smiles as
she stands intensely being in stillness
Slowness in
her blue dress advancing standing I go
And far
across a field over the jewel grass
The play of
the family stroke by stroke acted out
Gestures of
deep acknowledging on the journey stages
Of the
playings the play of the goddess and the god
A supple god
of searching and reaching
Who weaves
his strength Who dances her more alive
The theatre
of all animals, my snakes, my great horses
Always the
journey long
patient many haltings
Many
waitings for choice and again easy breathing
When the
decision to go on is made
Along the
long slopes of choice and again the world
The play of
poetry approaching in its solving
Solvings of
relations in poems and silences
For we were
born to express born for a journey
Caves,
theatres, the companioned solitary way
And then I
came to the place of mournful labor
A turn in
the road and the long sight from the cliff
Over the
scene of the land dug away to nothing and many
Seen to a
stripped horizon carrying barrows of earth
A hod of
earth taken and emptied and thrown away
Repeated
farther than sight. The voice saying slowly
But it is
hell. I heard my own voice in the words
Or it could
be a foundation And after the words
My chance
came. To enter. The theatres of
the world.
4
FRAGILE
I think of
the image brought into my room
Of the sage
and the thin young man who flickers and asks.
He is asking
about the moment when the Buddha
Offers the lotus,
a flower held out as declaration.
“Isn’t that
fragile?” he asks. The sage answers:
“I speak to
you. You speak to me. Is that
fragile?”
5 THE
LONG BODY
This journey
is exploring us. Where the child stood
An island in
a river of crisis, now
The bridges
bind us in symbol, the sea
Is a bond,
the sky reaches into our bodies.
We pray : we
dive into each other’s eyes.
Whatever can
come to a woman can come to me.
This is the
long body : into life from the beginning,
Big-headed
infant unfolding into child, who stretches and finds
And then
flowing the young one going tall, sunward,
And now
full-grown, held, tense, setting feet to the ground,
Going as we
go in the changes of the body,
As it is
changes, in the long strip of our many
Shapes, as
we range shifting through time.
The long
body : a procession of images.
This moment
in a city, in its dream of war.
We
chose to be,
Becoming the
only ones under the trees
when the harsh sound
Of the
machine sirens spoke. There were these two men,
And the
bearded one, the boys, the Negro mother feeding
Her baby.
And threats, the ambulance with open doors.
Now silence.
Everyone else within the walls. We sang.
We are the living island,
We the flesh
of this island, being lived,
Whoever
knows us is part of us today.
Whatever can
happen to anyone can happen to me.
Fire
striking its word among us, waterlilies
Reaching
from darkness upward to a sun
Of rebirth,
the implacable. And in our myth
The Changing
Woman who is still and who offers.
Eyes
drinking light, transforming light, this day
That
struggles with itself, brings itself to birth.
In ways of
being, through silence, sources of light
Arriving
behind my eye, a dialogue of light.
And
everything a witness of the buried life.
This moment
flowing across the sun, this force
Of flowers
and voices body in body through space.
The city of
endless cycles of the sun.
I speak to
you You speak to me
