Quotes from Ruth Stone

Interviewer: The other day, when we first talked, you said that you felt that, when you were writing, you were often following invisible patterns. Stone: I don't see them so much as hear them, and I know that a poem will happen and later I will look at it, and say: Wow, where did that come from? how did I do that? I didn't set out to do that, but the neural connections are so fast, the body, the self is so slow, (laughs) that you're kind of astonished. It's odd.

The most beautiful videos come from reading poetry. And they're in your head.

To violate beauty is the essence of sexual desire. To procreate is the essence of decay.

and what is not there is always more than there.

Do all things come to an end? No, they go on forever.

The light air, the restless leaves; the ripple of time warped by our longing. There, as if we were painted by some unknown impressionist.

Like flocks of small dark birds, hidden parts of the self weep

Incarnation is an empty glass.

Taste and smell of rain and beyond the veil, your voice, its trembling overtones without body or remorse; these hours that keep me as an ornament.

Your voice still beating inside my skull, as if I could put my fingers through my eyes and pull you out. This dumb external universe.

It's a dirty self-cleaning universe.

April splinters like an ice palace.

blinded visionary that locks the moon in place; I am the simple sieve that drinks the universe.

What is imperative is the Off switch; which he, at one point some time ago, opted for himself.

All night you waited for morning, all morning for afternoon, all afternoon for night; and still the longing sings. Oh, paper bird with folded wings.

Without a key, light enters with its hot blond muzzle and lies upon the body; and the body stirs and remembers. — Ruth Stone, from "Light," In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

Caught on the thorns of our joys as we run. Emily, Emily, child of the sun.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 forces, With these few blocks, To invent the universe.

Every hour love's bones grow lighter.

Back then, I say, you could have died easily as he, all those frail geniuses died of syphilis or TB.