Ruth Stone

The shock comes slowly as an afterthought. First you hear the words and they are like all other words, ordinary, breathing out of lips, moving toward you in a straight line. Later they shatter and rearrange themselves. They spell something else hidden in the muscles of the face, something the throat wanted to say. Decoded, the message etches itself in acid so every syllable becomes a sore. The shock blooms into a carbuncle. The body bends to accommodate it. A special scarf has to be worn to conceal it. It is now the size of a head. The next time you look, it has grown two eyes and a mouth. It is difficult to know which to use. Now you are seeing everything twice. After a while it becomes an old friend. It reminds you every day of how it came to be.

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.

In the longer view it doesn’t matter. However, it’s that having lived, it matters. So that every death breaks you apart. You find yourself weeping at the door of your own kitchen, overwhelmed by loss. And you find yourself weeping as you pass the homeless person head in hands resigned on a cement step, the wire basket on wheels right there. Like stopped film, or a line of Vallejo, or a sketch of the mechanics of a wing by Leonardo. All pauses in space, a violent compression of meaning in an instant within the meaningless. Even staring into the dim shapes at the farthest edge; accepting that blur.

I went back, as to my relatives. When I arrived, the elms had been shaved. But you were all the same. The buildings, the dry classrooms. I embraced your eyes, your avenues. You were fixed in the same expressions. Your flat voices, your dental work, like your lips, slipping over words already said. Additional agricultural pamphlets; many of you sat in private offices. Why did I think I could drag it all back, the former edge of town where streets ended in fields under clouds puffed like the French phrases he kissed me with in the sucked-in breath of that illusive happiness. Coming back, listening, looking; ready to take your bodies in my hands. Returning to streets that had poured heavy shopping malls over the hay-sweet grass where he and I lay whispering the most important nonsense of my desperate and embittered life.

While needles of the evergreen practice a windy chaos, heads of snarled hair; something in the tree longs for old age; bald brown knobs of skull without subterfuge; but it continues with its greedy resinous sexual odors. The odors rise against one another, spurting away from the scaly bark. Along its fingers the tree holds out microscopic traps. Popping bullets of sunlight crack into the subliminal orifices, and the tree thinks, “How exquisite. Is this love?”

This circle holding the afternoon sky is a lake For summer business measured in stacked pairs Of peeling oars whose dinghies all ship water. Beside it on the trampled grass a carrousel shakes And turns on an Old World instrument The plink and plank and tinkle of a tune Of plunging horses in fresh habiliment. We catch the reins of enamel Pegasus And lift the child until she is astride A purple beast, where, wrapping infant arms About his neck of wood, she whirls in space And gallops off upon the turning wheel. The horse climbs steadily the silver pole Where cherubs hang, then slides toward spinning earth; She sees the moving heaven of winged babes; Rising to meet them, rising, she returns To where our faces, staring in at hers, Fixed, while her orbit whirls and sunlight burns, Recede to artifact as her vision blurs.

There hangs this bellied pear, let no rake doubt, Meat for the tongue and febrile to the skin, Wasting for the mildew and the rot, A tallow rump slow rounded, a pelt thin And for the quickest bite; so, orchard bred, Heaviest downward from the shaking stem. Whose fingers curve around the ripened head Lust to split so fine a diadem. There is the picker, stretches for the knife, There are the ravening who claw the fruit, More, those adjuring wax that lasts a life, And foxes, freak for cunning, after loot. For that sweet suck the hornet whines his wits, But husbandman will dry her for the pits. December 1951

Waiting for your ride in front of the house where you spent the night, where, as a third ear during their endless intimate, important, and kinky phone calls, you pretended to rinse glassware; you were a dog from the pound, grateful, sniffing the upholstery. Later, lying in the center of their king-sized bed, a giant wall-to-wall mirror, isolating you like a rabbit; it was also their exercise room with torture equipment; something in you twitched; flickering a bizarre video in your head. It’s morning now. You’re standing outside, with nightgown and toothbrush wrapped in your purse, waiting for a bus to take you somewhere else. You’re depressed. They’re asleep of course. Their network wrapped around them. You keep wondering why you’re missing something. Then you look back and see your pricked-up ears, your waggy self, stuck inside their picture window, where for years it will wave at you—naive, apologetic, embarrassed.

Here where the rooms are dryly still Who is this dustily asleep While juicy children run the field? Where is her ever deepening well Whose buckets to a fullness dip For needs compassion must fulfill? Like freshets they themselves may yield A little to the turned up cup, But death is in the long dry spell. Run children, run, the light grows dull, And she who keeps the well must sleep, And rain is unpredictable. December 1951

To you born into violence, the wars of the red ant are nothing; you, in the heart of the eruption. I am speaking from immeasurable grass blades. You, there on the rubble, what is the river of vapor to you? You who are helpless as small birds downed on the ice pack. You who are spoiled as commercial fruit by the medfly. To you the machine guns. To you the semen of fire, the birth of the maggot in the corpse. You, to whom we send these gifts; at the heart of light we are crushed together. When the sun dies we will become one.