Ruth Stone > Quotes

“The campus, an academy of trees,
under which some hand, the wind's I guess,
had scattered the pale light
of thousands of spring beauties,
petals stained with pink veins;
secret, blooming for themselves.
We sat among them.
Your long fingers, thin body,
and long bones of improbable genius;
some scattered gene as Kafka must have had.
Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles.
That simple that was myself, half conscious,
as though each moment was a page
where words appeared; the bent hammer of the type
struck against the moving ribbon.
The light air, the restless leaves;
the ripple of time warped by our longing.
There, as if we were painted
by some unknown impressionist.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“Stone: Yes, we are everything, every experience we've ever had, and in some of us, a lot of it translates and makes patterns, poems. But, my God, we don't even began to touch upon it. There's an enormous amount, but we can touch such a little.

Interviewer: That's true, just a very small portion.

Stone: Very small. I think that's one of the things that our minds do; they sort out, somehow, often, and make patterns of significant things to us. And I think our minds do that for us in the dark, and then they offer them back in poems. I think your mind makes up your poem before you get it. You know, you receive the poem from your mind, you know you do. It takes a multitude of experiences, and all this language, and all this sound, and puts it together in these patterns that are significant to you and gives it back to you.”
― 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.”
― Ruth Stone

“Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“blinded visionary that locks the moon in place;
I am the simple sieve that drinks the universe.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“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.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“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.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“Like flocks of small dark birds,
hidden parts of the self weep”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“The most beautiful videos
come from reading poetry.
And they're in your head.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“To violate beauty
is the essence of sexual desire.
To procreate is the essence of decay.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“and what is not there
is always more than there.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“I sometimes stood for long moments
listening to some bird telling me of the strangeness of myself”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“This tedious letter to you . . .
what is one life to another?”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“Incarnation is an empty glass.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“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

“The light air, the restless leaves;
the ripple of time warped by our longing.
There, as if we were painted
by some unknown impressionist.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“What is imperative is the Off switch;
which he, at one point some time ago,
opted for himself.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“It's a dirty self-cleaning universe.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“April splinters like an ice palace.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“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.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“Of course they are gloomy;
they drink a lot of vodka.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“Back then, I say, you could have died easily as he,
all those frail geniuses died of syphilis or TB.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“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

“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.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“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

“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