Stone, Ruth

United States, (1915-2011)

Another Feeling

  1. Once you saw a drove of young pigs
  2. crossing the highway. One of them
  3. pulling his body by the front feet,
  4. the hind legs dragging flat.
  5. Without thinking,
  6. you called the Humane Society.
  7. They came with a net and went for him.
  8. They were matter of fact, uniformed;
  9. there were two of them,
  10. their truck ominous, with a cage.
  11. He was hiding in the weeds. It was then
  12. you saw his eyes. He understood.
  13. He was trembling.
  14. After they took him, you began to suffer regret.
  15. Years later, you remember his misfit body
  16. scrambling to reach the others.
  17. Even at this moment, your heart
  18. is going too fast; your hands sweat.

 Ruth Stone. In the Dark. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press (2004).

Certainly Not

  1. The man across the seat
  2. would cause a farmer to look thoughtful.
  3. There’s so much meat.
  4. It flabs under his polo shirt.
  5. His right thigh,
  6. in slate gray pants,
  7. is huge, gorged.
  8. If roasted
  9. you could get slices,
  10. enough for thirty or more
  11. at dinner,
  12. and his right hand,
  13. resting at his crotch,
  14. would fill a quart jar
  15. as pig’s knuckles,
  16. tender and sweet.
  17. The red sloping face,
  18. with full double chin
  19. attached ear to ear,
  20. his young bristle mustache,
  21. snubbed nose, his head
  22. drooped in flushed sleep.
  23. Poor thing, he says he sleeps around
  24. because his wife is sick.
  25. That’s so considerate.
  26. What’s marriage
  27. without its little ups and downs?
  28. Up with students
  29. down with gals.
  30. Gals are past thirty-five
  31. and try too hard.
  32. While I am at the whetstone.
  33. naming the cuts.
  34. the wrapped quarters,
  35. even the little coral of his brain
  36. could be packaged.

 Ruth Stone. What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press (2008) – finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.

About the Poet:

Ruth Stone, United States, (1915-2011), was a poet, author, and educator. Stone’s first book of verse, In an Iridescent Time, was published in 1959. Shortly after, Stone’s second husband, the promising poet and writer Walter Stone, committed suicide, leaving Stone a widow with three young children. For twenty years she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of California Davis and Brandeis.

Stone did not publish her second book, Topography, until 1971 and remained a fairly obscure voice until the series of awards and accolades at the beginning of the millennium drew national attention. In 1990, she became a professor of English at SUNY Binghamton.

Having lived in Vermont since 1957, Stone was named Vermont’s poet laureate in 2007. Stone’s other honors and awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Walter Cerf Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. [DES-01/22]

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