|
The Imagined Galaxies of Ruth Stone
Lauded American Poet Reflects on Joys, Pains of Life
 |
Ruth Stone on her porch in Goshen, Vt.
Credit: Andrea Hsu, NPR
Enlarge Image
 |
 |
Stone on her 89th birthday with her daughters, granddaughter and great grandson.
Credit: Andrea Hsu, NPR
Enlarge Image
|
 |
Stone bought her 200-year-old farmhouse back in 1957 for $3,500, using money from a poetry prize.
Credit: Andrea Hsu, NPR
|
|
July 19, 2004 -- When Ruth Stone accepted the National Book Award for poetry in 2002, she joked, "I think you probably gave it to me because I'm old." She was 87 when she won. It was a late-in-life validation of her standing among America's contemporary poets.
Stone also recently won the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Galway Kinnell, also a poet and one of the prize's judges, said at the time, "Her poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness... the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory."
Much of Stone's work is about the New England countryside. She also writes poems about poems, and more recently, about her failing eyesight. And for 45 years now, her husband Walter's suicide has haunted her work.
Last month, Stone celebrated her 89th birthday with family and neighbors at her ramshackle farmhouse in Goshen, Vt. NPR's Melissa Block traveled to the farmhouse to meet with Stone, and before the celebration, she talked with her about her life and work.
Hear Stone Read From Her Poems
"So What"
"Rising"
"Margaret Street"
Additional Poems from In The Next Galaxy, Second-Hand Coat, and In the Dark
"The Cave"
"Poems"
"In the Next Galaxy"
"Spring Snow"
"Turn Your Eyes Away"
"Accepting"
 So What (Ordinary Words)
For me the great truths are laced with hysteria.
How many Einsteins can we tolerate?
I leap into 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.
Back To Top
Rising (In the Next Galaxy)
In the government offices the rules and regulations
regarding erosion of beaches move from one file to another.
The sand whispers back into the undertow.
At the South Pole, part of the frozen continent splits
and melts, eating into the ice pack.
Along the Eastern Seaboard a house on the ocean
is lifted on stilts. It walks into the water.
The piles driven deep into the sand are at last exposed,
their thin bones fragile as tiny starfish.
The windows, blank eyes of dead seagulls,
catch the phosphorescence in the choppy waves.
The waves are as even as furrows in a cornfield.
But the house is moving in the opposite direction.
How mild the evening is. No one would suppose
that the house is going out with the tide.
Back To Top
Margaret Street (In the Dark)
In September Margaret Street
waits for the comet.
No one but the earth knows that it is coming.
And the earth with its extravagant garment
like Salome's veils
gyrates in the sensual clasp.
In September the deepest basins
gush up their silt.
On Margaret Street the neighbors take out their trash.
It is Sunday. Each delayed moment
is wrested out of the seething mass.
On Mitchell Ave, where vision was still brilliant,
I suffered small indignities.
Ignorance lies always in the past.
O language that follows like the comet's tail;
the rubble of senseless longing
for what was.
Back To Top
The Cave (In the Dark)
My mahjong eyes weep
when the sky weeps,
when color fades,
but it is the alphabet,
neat, succulent,
fresh slants of light
on the cave walls.
O skull, your hieroglyphs
shine far down
the passage,
as if the vapors
wrapped around
this spinning rock
were sweet as
lemon peel.
Back To Top
Poems (In the Next Galaxy)
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.
Back To Top
In the Next Galaxy (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 wraparound 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 have true
blue skies and drinking water.
Back To Top
Spring Snow (In the Next Galaxy)
Rain of remembering;
late snow turning to rain.
Then in the cold house,
alone in bed,
the soft stutter on the roof,
random phrases; your voice,
only your voice. How can
it be that voice that touched
me everywhere?
And what you said,
if only I could hear it again
in its intensity.
Essence distilled
in the moment of waking,
the delicate mold and odors
of the breaking apart of winter,
in the soft snow that comes
between the past and the chill
distillation, the whisper of air
split between the perfume
of melting crystals; the clasp
and letting go.
Back To Top
Turn Your Eyes Away (Second-Hand Coat)
The gendarme came
to tell me you had hung yourself
on the door of a rented room
like an overcoat
like a bathrobe
hung from a hook;
when they forced the door open
your feet pushed against the floor.
Inside your skull
there was no room for us,
your circuits forgot me.
Even in Paris where we never were
I wait for you
knowing you will not come.
I remember your eyes as if I were
someone you had never seen,
a slight frown between your brows
considering me.
How could I have guessed
the plain-spoken stranger in your face,
your body, tagged in a drawer,
attached to nothing, incurious.
My sister, my spouse, you said,
in a place on the other side of the earth
where we lay in a single bed
unable to pull apart
breathing into each other,
the Gideon Bible open to the Song of Songs,
the rush of the El-train
jarring the window.
As if needles were stuck
in the pleasure zones of our brains,
we repeated everything
over and over and over.
Back To Top
Accepting (In the Dark)
Half-blind, it is always twilight.
The dusk of my time and the nights
are so long, and the days of my tribe
flash by, their many-colored cars
choking the air, and I lie like a shah
on my divan in this 21st century
mosque, indifferent to my folded
flesh that falls in on itself,
almost inert, remembering crossing
the fields, turning corners, coming
home to the lighted windows,
the pedestrian years of it, accepting
from each hand the gifts,
without knowing why they were
given or what to make of them.
|
