The Question

By Ruth Stone 1915–2011 Ruth Stone

While needles of the evergreen

practice a windy chaos,

heads of snarled hair;

something in the tree

longs for old age;

bald brown knobs of skull

without subterfuge;

but it continues with its greedy

resinous sexual odors.

The odors rise against one another,

spurting away from the scaly bark.

Along its fingers the tree

holds out microscopic traps.

Popping bullets of sunlight

crack into the subliminal

orifices, and the tree thinks,

“How exquisite. Is this love?”

Source: Simplicity (1995)

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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