Romance

By Ruth Stone 1915–2011 Ruth Stone

I went back, as to my relatives.

When I arrived, the elms had been shaved.

But you were all the same.

The buildings, the dry classrooms.

I embraced your eyes, your avenues.

You were fixed in the same expressions.

Your flat voices, your dental work,

like your lips, slipping over words already said.

Additional agricultural pamphlets;

many of you sat in private offices.

Why did I think I could drag it all back,

the former edge of town where

streets ended in fields under clouds

puffed like the French phrases

he kissed me with in the sucked-in breath

of that illusive happiness.

Coming back, listening, looking;

ready to take your bodies in my hands.

Returning to streets that had poured

heavy shopping malls

over the hay-sweet grass

where he and I lay whispering

the most important nonsense

of my desperate and embittered life.

Source: Ordinary Words (1999)

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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