Ruth Stone Poems

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Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you. 
But consider the railroad's edge of metal trash;
bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle?
If you think about it, it turns into words. 
Trash is so cheerful; flying up
like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls...Read more of this...

Here is not exactly here
because it passed by there
two seconds ago;
where it will not come back.
Although you adjust to this- 
it's nothing, you say,
just the way it is.
How poor we are,
with all this running
through our fingers.
"Here," says the Devil,
"Eat. It's Paradise." ...Read more of this...

In the Next Galaxy 
Things will be different. 
No one will lose their sight, 
their hearing, their gallbladder. 
It will be all Catskills with brand 
new wrap-around verandas. 
The idea of Hitler will not have vibrated yet. 
While back here, 
they are still cleaning out 
pockets of wrinkled 
Nazis hiding in Argentina. 
But in the next galaxy, 
certain planets will...Read more of this...

This tedious letter to you,
what is one Life to another?
We walk around inside our bags,
sucking it in, spewing it out.
Then the insects, swarms heavier
than all the animals of the world.
Then the flycatchers on the clothesline,
like seiners leaning from Flemish boats
when the seas were roiled with herring.
This long letter in my mind,
calligraphy, feathery asparagus. ...Read more of this...

When you come back to me
it will be crow time
and flycatcher time,
with rising spirals of gnats
between the apple trees.
Every weed will be quadrupled,
coarse, welcoming
and spine-tipped.
The crows, their black flapping
bodies, their long calling
toward the mountain;
relatives, like mine,
ambivalent, eye-hooded;
hooting and tearing.
And you will take me in
to your fractal meaningless
babble; the quick of my mouth,
the madness of my tongue....Read more of this...

It is spring when the storks return.
They rise from storied roofs.
In the quick winter afternoon
you lie on your bed
with a library book close to your face,
your body on a single bed,
and the storks rise
with the sound of a lifted sash.
You know without looking
that a servant girl
is leaning out in the soft foreign air.
A slow spiral of smoke
from green firewood
is reflected...Read more of this...

A basket of dirty clothes
spills all day long
down the mountain
beating the rocks
with a horrible washer-woman's cry.
Now two riders go by
horseback on the dirt road.
Young women talking of antique latches,
blind to the dirty linen,
smells of urine, bedsores,
bowels of old women
left on their backs,
fat and lye,
lies of doctoring men.
Strange weather mid-summer
is summer spent.
I open a book of poems.
All lies on the psalter,...Read more of this...

For me the great truths are laced with hysteria.
How many Einsteins can we tolerate?
I leap into the uncertainty principle.
After so many smears, you want to wash it off with a laugh.
Ha ha, you say. So what if it's a meltdown?
Last lines to poems I will write immediately....Read more of this...

The abandoned campus,
empty brick buildings and early June
when you came to visit me;
crossing the states midway,
the straggled belts of little roads;
hitchhiking with your portable typewriter.
The campus, an academy of trees,
under which some hand, the wind's I guess,
had scattered the pale light
of thousands of spring beauties,
petals stained with pink veins;
secret, blooming for themselves.
We sat among them.
Your long fingers, thin body,
and long...Read more of this...

Words make the thoughts.
Severe tyrants, like the scrubbers
and guardians of your cells.
They herd your visions
down the ramp to nexus
waiting with sledge hammer
to knock what is the knowing
without knowing into knowledge.
Yes, the tight bag of grammar,
syntax, the clever sidestep
from babble, is a comfortable
prison. A mirror of the mirror.
And all that is uttered in its chains
is locked out from the secret....Read more of this...

It is so hard to see where it is,
but it is there even in the morning
when the miracle of shapes
assemble and become familiar,
but not quite; and the echo
of a voice, now changed,
utterly dissociated, as though
all warmth and shared sweetness
had never been. It is this alien
space, not stark as the moon,
but lush and almost identical
to the space that was. But it...Read more of this...

Wallace Stevens says,
"A poet looks at the world
as a man looks at a woman."

I can never know what a man sees
when he looks at a woman.

That is a sealed universe.

On the outside of the bubble
everything is stretched to infinity.

Along the blacktop, trees are bearded as old men,
like rows of nodding gray-bearded mandarins.
Their secondhand beards were spun by female gypsy moths.

All...Read more of this...