Peripheries

By Ruth Stone 1915–2011 Ruth Stone

This circle holding the afternoon sky is a lake

For summer business measured in stacked pairs

Of peeling oars whose dinghies all ship water.

Beside it on the trampled grass a carrousel shakes

And turns on an Old World instrument

The plink and plank and tinkle of a tune

Of plunging horses in fresh habiliment.

We catch the reins of enamel Pegasus

And lift the child until she is astride

A purple beast, where, wrapping infant arms

About his neck of wood, she whirls in space

And gallops off upon the turning wheel.

The horse climbs steadily the silver pole

Where cherubs hang, then slides toward spinning earth;

She sees the moving heaven of winged babes;

Rising to meet them, rising, she returns

To where our faces, staring in at hers,

Fixed, while her orbit whirls and sunlight burns,

Recede to artifact as her vision blurs.

Ruth Stone, “Peripheries.” Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: In An Iridescent Time (1959)

Biography

Poet Ruth Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1915 and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She lived in a rural farmhouse in Vermont for much of her life and received widespread recognition relatively late with the publication of Ordinary Words (1999). The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was soon followed by other award-winning collections, including In the Next Galaxy (2002), winner . . .

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