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Best Famous Ruth Stone Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Ruth Stone poems. This is a select list of the best famous Ruth Stone poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Ruth Stone poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of Ruth Stone poems.

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by Ruth Stone | |

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 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.

by Ruth Stone | |

So What

For me the great truths are laced with hysteria.
How many Einsteins can we tolerate? I leap into the 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.

by Ruth Stone | |


Words make the thoughts.
Severe tyrants, like the scrubbers and guardians of your cells.
They herd your visions down the ramp to nexus waiting with sledge hammer to knock what is the knowing without knowing into knowledge.
Yes, the tight bag of grammar, syntax, the clever sidestep from babble, is a comfortable prison.
A mirror of the mirror.
And all that is uttered in its chains is locked out from the secret.

by Ruth Stone | |


Wallace Stevens says,
"A poet looks at the world
as a man looks at a woman.
" I can never know what a man sees when he looks at a woman.
That is a sealed universe.
On the outside of the bubble everything is stretched to infinity.
Along the blacktop, trees are bearded as old men, like rows of nodding gray-bearded mandarins.
Their secondhand beards were spun by female gypsy moths.
All mandarins are trapped in their images.
A poet looks at the world as a woman looks at a man.

by Ruth Stone | |


It is spring when the storks return.
They rise from storied roofs.
In the quick winter afternoon you lie on your bed with a library book close to your face, your body on a single bed, and the storks rise with the sound of a lifted sash.
You know without looking that a servant girl is leaning out in the soft foreign air.
A slow spiral of smoke from green firewood is reflected in her eyes.
She moves down an outside stair absently driving the poultry.
The storks are standing on the roof.
The girl wraps her hands in her apron.
Small yellow flowers have clumped among the tussocks of coarse grass.
She listens with her mouth open to something you cannot hear.
Your body is asleep.
She smiles.
She does not know a cavalry is coming on a mud-rutted road, and men with minds like ferrets are stamping their heavy boots along the pages.

by Ruth Stone | |


This tedious letter to you,
what is one Life to another?
We walk around inside our bags,
sucking it in, spewing it out.
Then the insects, swarms heavier than all the animals of the world.
Then the flycatchers on the clothesline, like seiners leaning from Flemish boats when the seas were roiled with herring.
This long letter in my mind, calligraphy, feathery asparagus.

by Ruth Stone | |

Good Advice

Here is not exactly here
because it passed by there
two seconds ago;
where it will not come back.
Although you adjust to this- it's nothing, you say, just the way it is.
How poor we are, with all this running through our fingers.
"Here," says the Devil, "Eat.
It's Paradise.

by Ruth Stone | |

Always on the Train

Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you.
But consider the railroad's edge of metal trash; bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle? If you think about it, it turns into words.
Trash is so cheerful; flying up like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers, squares of clear plastic--windows on a house of air.
Below the weedy edge in last year's mat, red and silver beer cans.
In bits blown equally everywhere, the gaiety of flying paper and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

by Ruth Stone | |

Spring Beauties

The abandoned campus,
empty brick buildings and early June
when you came to visit me;
crossing the states midway,
the straggled belts of little roads;
hitchhiking with your portable typewriter.
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.

by Ruth Stone | |

This Strangeness in My Life

It is so hard to see where it is,
but it is there even in the morning
when the miracle of shapes
assemble and become familiar,
but not quite; and the echo
of a voice, now changed,
utterly dissociated, as though
all warmth and shared sweetness
had never been.
It is this alien space, not stark as the moon, but lush and almost identical to the space that was.
But it is not.
It is another place and you are not what you were but as though emerging from the air, you slowly show yourself as someone else, not ever remembered.

by Ruth Stone | |

Repetition of Words and Weather

A basket of dirty clothes
spills all day long
down the mountain
beating the rocks
with a horrible washer-woman's cry.
Now two riders go by horseback on the dirt road.
Young women talking of antique latches, blind to the dirty linen, smells of urine, bedsores, bowels of old women left on their backs, fat and lye, lies of doctoring men.
Strange weather mid-summer is summer spent.
I open a book of poems.
All lies on the psalter, I say, the dead are silent.
The riders come back chatting like birds.
What would I not give to return that way.
Their horses trot in a break of sunlight over the road.
And I think, what's done is done.
It won't be changed with words.

by Ruth Stone | |


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.