The Essential Ruth Stone Quotes

“WHAT IS A POEM?

Such slight changes in air pressure,
Tongue and palate,
And the difference in teeth.
Transparent words.

Why do I want to say ochre,
Or what is green-yellow?
The sisters of those leaves on the ground
Still lisp on the branches.
Why do I want to imitate them?

Having come this far
With a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
With these few blocks,
To invent the universe.”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone

“ALL IN TIME

With something to do,
No wonder I sit at the typewriter.
Behind me, the clock has the
Monotonous voice of a parent.
Always it is something else I prefer.
The dictionary is a moving fanfare.
The compressed words of my life.
…
I walk down Longest Avenue holding my umbrella.
Information, merely information;
Everywhere bone sparkle,
Radials sifting deeper into ooze.
How I am coming apart.
How I scatter.
The air sparkles with my dust.
…
Sir William Herschel saw pinpoints
Of another kind of space
From which the milk of galaxies were poured,
As from a pitcher.
What is this universe that occupies my face?
I travel in an orderly erratic place.
I am a particle,
I am going toward something. I am complicated,
And yet, how simple is my verse.”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone

“MY MOTHER’S PHLOX

To send this to you toward the end of summer,
I was forced to rebuild my desktop.
Not in the old-fashioned way,
With saw and eye laid alongside the board
With some rue in my fingers,
But I wanted to create phlox.
Although, god knows, it can’t be done
In three dimensions, as the earth
Has so easily done it, but who can compete
With the earth? No, I wanted only the words
And they have lost themselves in the fields
Or along the gravel road. It’s just as well.
(Floks) n. pl. various plants of the genus Phlox,
Having opposite leaves and flowers,
With variously colored salverform corolla.
Over the years the phlox have spread
Even into the fields beyond the barn,
Into the edge of the woods, inventions
Of themselves in endless designs…
They exhale their faint perfume summer after summer,
And summer after summer it was my nightlong
Intoxicant. It was my potion, my ragged butterfly,
My faulty memory of my mother
Who was the same age then, as I am now.
As then, I was the same age you are now,
When my mother planted these phlox in my garden.
I’m sending them to you by UPS,
Wrapped in plastic in a proper box.
Take them out and stick them in water;
Dig a good bed and spread the roots.
They need almost no care.
They cast their seed; they thrive on neglect.
Later, they may change like the faces you love,
Ravaged and ravishing from year to year.”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone

“AND SO FORTH

Someone, or a group of someones,
Has gone to consider the strange altered behavior
Of penguins along the tip of south America.
It’s a film and reporting thing to do.
And someone like me thinks upon it.
Here in darkest Binghamton, I think of the plight of penguins
In the rapidly changing climate
Of the oceans and polar regions.
…as an Adelie penguin becomes my own penguin,
Inside my skull, even its oil-coated sleek body
That stands and waddles toward its own nest,
Somewhere among the million other nests,
And its own chick crying out
Among the million others, is distinctive.
Can I hope the great ear of the universe
Is pressed to the wall of space and hears me,
Its own chick peeping? Over here in this galaxy,
This little freight of penguins
And so forth?”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone

“WILD ASTERS

I am here to worship the blue
asters along the brook;
not to carry pollen on my legs,
or rub strutted wings
in mindless sucking;
but to feel with my eyes
the loss of you and me,
not in the powdered mildew
that spreads from leaf to leaf,
but in the glorious absence of grief
to see what was not meant to be seen,
the clusters, the aggregate, the undenying multiplicity.”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone

“GREEN APPLES
In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something:
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,
Here, now.”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone

“BEING HUMAN

Though all the force to hold the parts together
And service love reverse, turned negative,
Fountained in self destroying flames
And rained ash in volcanic weather;
We are still here where you left us
With our own kind: unstable strangers
Trembling in the sound waves of meaningless
Eloquence. They say we live.
They say, as they rise on the horizon
And come toward us dividing and dividing,
That we must save; that we must solve; transcend
Cohesive and repelling flesh, protoplasm, particles and survive.
I do not doubt that we will; I do not doubt all things are possible,
Even that wildest hope that we may meet beyond the grave.”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone

“THE TALKING FISH

My love's eyes are red as the sargasso
With lights behind the iris like a cephalopod's.
The weeds move slowly, November's diatoms
Stain the soft stagnant belly of the sea.
Mountains, atolls, coral reefs,
Do you desire me? Am I among the jellyfish of your griefs?
I comb my sorrows singing; any doomed sailor can hear
The rising and falling bell and begin to wish
For home. There is no choice among the voices
Of love. Even a carp sings.”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone

“SPECULATION

In the coolness here I care
Not for the down-pressed noises overhead,
I hear in my pearly bone the wear
Of marble under the rain; nothing is truly dead,
There is only the wearing away,
The changing of means. Nor eyes I have
To tell how in the summer the mourning dove
Rocks on the hemlock’s arm, nor ears to rend
The sad regretful mind
With the call of the horned lark.
I lie so still that the earth around me
Shakes with the weight of day;
I do not mind if the vase
Holds decomposed cut flowers, or if they send
One of their kind to tidy up. Such play
I have no memories of,
Nor of the fire-bush flowers, or the bark
Of the rough pine where the crows
With their great haw and flap
Circle in kinned excitement when a wind blows.
I am kin with none of these,
Nor even wed to the yellowing silk that splits;
My sensitive bones, which dreaded,
As all the living do, the dead,
Wait for some unappointed pattern. The wits
Of countless centuries dry in my skull and overhead
I do not heed the first rain out of winter,
Nor do I care what they have planted. At my center
The bone glistens; of wondrous bones I am made;
And alone shine in a phosphorous glow,
So, in this little plot where I am laid.”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone

“THE MAGNET

…I heard him coming through brambles, through narrow forests, I bid my
nights unwind,
I bid my days turn back, I broke my windows, I unsealed my locks.”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone

“SNOW
Plentiful snow deepens the path to the woods.
Hay, hawing, shakes the juniper,
Gray squirrel and titmouse trick in hectic moods,
Fluff buffeters of down and fur.
Jay skates on ice-blue air with bluer flight,
Dives in down-soft whirl and comes up light.
The dried and dead hackberry dangles white,
Tall trees droop down while ground grows up,
And the powder-white snuff blows from the wind’s lip…”
― Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone