December 7, 2012

Too early to see much, just now beginning to be my favorite color, slowly the trees are standing out in their silhouettes, some leafy, some bare.  Yesterday I said I had not heard much from the birds lately, but last night one made himself heard, a mockingbird at about 2 am started singing, and then just chattered for the longest time.  I woke up from a sound sleep because I thought I had overslept hearing birds already, but he finally went silent about 2:30 and I went back to sleep as well.  So, today I can't complain about not hearing the birds!

When I was looking for a poem yesterday, I found one I liked, and realized it was a tribute to a poet I liked, Ruth Stone.  She had written many books of poetry over the years and taught at a lot of colleges, but did not get a whole lot of recognition.  When she was 86, she won the National Book Award for her book In the Next Galaxy, and published her last book of poems in 2008 when she was 93.  Her poems often speak of ordinary things, daily life, and all the small and large tragedies and joys that come into an ordinary life.  I admire that she kept writing and sharing her stories even when she was not noticed, that all through her long itinerant life she just kept writing and sending her work out into the world.  I have liked her poems for a long time and did not know or care if she were recognized or not, but I was glad to think some other poet valued her enough to write a poem for her passing.

The Gift

In memory of Ruth Stone

(June 8th, 1915-November 19th, 2011)

"All I did was write them down

wherever I was at the time, hanging

laundry, baking bread, driving to Illinois.

My name was attached to them

on the page but not in my head

because the bird I listened to outside

my window said I couldn't complain

about the blank in place of my name

if I wished to hold both ends of the wire

like a wire and continue to sing instead

of complain. It was my plight, my thorn,

my gift-the one word in three I was

permitted to call it by the Muse who took

mercy on me as long as I didn't explain."

Chard deNiord

I have heard several interviews with her online and think perhaps this poet used Stone's own words and shaped them into this poem.  Here is one of Ruth Stone's poems I like . . .

The Cabbage

You have rented an apartment.

You come to this enclosure with physical relief,

your heavy body climbing the stairs in the dark,

the hall bulb burned out, the landlord

of Greek extraction and possibly a fatalist.

In the apartment leaning against one wall,

your daughter's painting of a large frilled cabbage

against a dark sky with pinpoints of stars.

The eager vegetable, opening itself

as if to eat the air, or speak in cabbage

language of the meanings within meanings;

while the points of stars hide their massive

violence in the dark upper half of the painting.

You can live with this.

Ruth Stone

Because she taught in many places, I'm sure she lived in many different apartments; several other of her poems deal with landlords and strategies for living in other people's places.  I love this one because it was a combination of the work of her daughter and her work.  Because it made me want to find a painting of a cabbage for my walls, made me appreciate more the living I have where I can see the view out my own window.  Ruth Stone lived in a cabin in Vermont her later years, when she taught at a university in New York.  She fixed it up with money that came as prizes for her work, plumbing and a new roof, and made it her own place.   

Everyone should have a place to call home, a place they can look out the window and see something lovely, a cabbage maybe, or the stars.