Quotes from Ruth Stone

What are these things that draw toward us, these visitors that hide among us

Every night passes grief-stricken, weeping.

All pauses in space, a violent compression of meaning in an instant within the meaningless.

Not so much a game as a sphere, a mystery. Held up to light, a small hole into another dimension.

Strange imagined shapes of things, wild distortions of the familiar, like the galaxies, pinpoints, of the imagined; until the polished multiple eyes of lofted telescopes — while buffeted by cosmic dust and plasma — passed down bit by bit the great glass marble of the universe.

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 have true blue skies and drinking water.

I sometimes stood for long moments listening to some bird telling me of the strangeness of myself

It's that season of unreasoning hope

the resuscitation promised season after season, more and more like the paramedic breathing into the heart-stopped victim; the victim stretched unconscious on the sidewalk, the savior with the fix leaning into and sucking the dead back to the difficult, even impossible, even dreaded and unwanted quick.

Of course they are gloomy; they drink a lot of vodka.

How can I live like this?

All things come to an end. No, they go on forever.

This tedious letter to you . . . what is one life to another?