Seven Postcards from Dover

By Mary Ruefle b. 1952 Mary Ruefle

The teacher said inner truth

and the chalk said like a fresco inside the earth

that no one has ever seen

and one day decides to be discovered

and begins to breathe—

do you know what that means?

The child broke the chalk.

The mother said be strong.

The child said when I die I want to be a dwarf.

III

A detective has just drawn a circle

with a piece of chalk, a private circle

from which the victim will eventually look

up, not at random, not at will,

but when it calls to her,

the chalk, the crushed bones

of sea creatures who ringed the earth

when it was under water.

A man sits in the bath house

in a deep tub

of fizzling yellow water

that surrounds every hair on his body

and makes it stand upright.

When the attendant comes, she will

clean the tub by moving her hand

slowly around the ring, like a snail.

An atoll is a ring of coral

protecting a tureen of plankton.

It is easy and Japanese to be sad

knowing something is going to pass.

He put the ring on her chalky finger.

Long after chalk had passed out of use,

carpenters still felt for it in their pockets

and looked aimlessly at the sky.

VII

The cathedral was roofless.

It began to snow inside.

A half broken pillar in the nave

grew taller.

Mary Ruefle, “Seven Postcards from Dover” from Among the Musk OX People: Poems. Copyright © 2002 by Mary Ruefle. Reprinted by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Source: Among the Musk OX People: Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002)

Biography

Though poet and essayist Mary Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh, she spent her youth moving around the United States and Europe with her military family.

She has written numerous books of poetry, including Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (2007) and The Adamant (1989), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. A Little White Shadow (2006), her book of erasures—found texts in which all but a few words have been erased from the . . .

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