Ruth Stone

Scanning a list of women poets this morning, I pause at Ruth Stone. I heard her read her work decades ago. In an intimate theater—just a few rows of seats circling a worn, wooden stage—she was the last poet to read. The one we’d all come to hear, though I had no idea who she was.

After the promising new poets and the staid, published professor, there she was, with her long hair pulled up at the sides, in her loose shirt and baggy trousers. A grandmother, speaking of loss and nature.

I shook her small hand afterward, a gentle grip, the bones of her fingers barely beneath her cool skin. I was so young. Her poems introduced a wildness, rooted in the ordinary that I’d never experienced—all mixed with hurt, longing, persistence, and humor.

She was real, down-to-earth, quirky, more likely to sit on a mossy stump than on some literary pedestal.

She did things with language, strange and beautiful. She made you feel you could do that, too.

Her poems were at once simple and sublime, like her name. Her whole name just two syllables, but full of meaning. Ruth, yes, I knew that old story. Stone, how much metaphor that word has borne.

As I remember that evening, I realize how long it’s been since I read Ruth’s poems. “Ruth?” you ask, as If I knew her. You don’t have to know a writer to know a writer.

Hmmmm, what poems did she read that night? Too long ago. All that comes is, Something about apples?

I pull all my Ruth Stone books from a shelf, looking for whatever work would have existed when I was in my 20s. I land on:

I’m stunned, moved, grateful. Only now do I realize how much my reading of Ruth’s work earlier in my life has shaped how my poet’s eyes look into the world and how I come to the blank page to lay down my own pathway of words.

I read some online bios. How her second husband, Walter Stone, hung himself on the back of a door in the room they’d rented while the family was on sabbatical in London.

How did I not know this? I feel even closer to her.

Suddenly a single mother, lost in grief, she found herself saying to herself, “The bird has died,” which she later explained to others as, “The bird in me has died.” That realization marked the start of a painful journey to build a new world without Walter, and ultimately breathe new life into that bird.

One bio mentions how she died at 96 and was buried near the raspberry bushes behind her modest farmhouse in Vermont.

All day I think of those raspberry bushes where she’s buried, going through the seasons. The naked snowy cold, the lush seedy heat. I want to eat those berries, let Ruth feed my body the way she’s fed my mind and spirit.

Making a salad for supper, I see a pint of raspberries in the ‘fridge. I rinse a handful, one-by-one. Scatter them over the bowls of lettuce, peppers, cukes, and slivers of radish, nestling each delicate, bumpy, red body among pumpkin seeds.

Colorful, simple. I am happy.

Popping one sweet-tart raspberry in my mouth, I say, as Ruth did all those years ago:
“…this is the moment,
Here, now.”