Ruth Stone's "Lines" ...

from my anthology of (a)merican poems that should be read

Ruth Stone

Lines

Voice, perhaps you are the universe,
the hum of spiders.
If on the mountain a single bear
comes into the orchard;
much less, the husk of a locust
drops from the currant bush;
or the wind rattles a loose clapboard,
exchanging one skin for another—
it is the self longing to cross the barrier.
Sensing the visitors who hide among us,
the air enters and takes away.
Sharp as the odor of fresh sawdust,
the color of lost rooms,
those erotic odors, angst of brevity;
like crossing your thighs
in a spasm of loneliness.

*

Sharon Olds once wrote: “A Ruth Stone poem feels alive in the hands—ardent, independent, restless” (The House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone, Ed. Wendy Barker and Sandra M. Gilbert). Restless is an accurate descriptive of Stone’s poetry. Her works come to me as living entities – a bombardment of the senses. I don’t read Ruth Stone with my mind; I read her with my entire body.

In “Lines,” a recent work, Stone challenges the reader from the beginning, directing the poem, not necessarily to the “you” we’ve come to expect in literature, but to a more universal presence, a voice in the poem – narrator, poet, reader, or the poem itself. Stone’s approach is anything but conventional. “Lines” is a poem that refuses to be tamed or confined. As a reader, I welcome this wildness, a quality that makes me want to come back to the poetry.

The imagery moves me off-center: universe, hum of spiders, the bear, the orchard, husk of locust, currant bush, clapboards rattling in wind, an exchange of skin. I’ve no way of knowing Stone’s full intention, but I do know that the surprise of her imagery, both real and specific, settles into a pivotal line: “it is the self longing to cross the barrier”. Stone resists any urge to offer an explanation of the barrier. The ambiguity enlarges the possibilities for understanding the separation – self and other, poet and reader, speaker and poem.

“Visitors who hide among us” reinforces my sense of otherness. The air entering and leaving strikes me as some sort of spiritual act – a blessing in the taking. Stone ends the work in a marvelous barrage of sawdust, color of lost rooms (an astounding image), and thighs in motion. Both erotic and troubled, the brief moment finds its physical action: “crossing your thighs”. The you of this line is never identified. In line nine, the self desires to cross the unnamed barrier. One possible reading of the penultimate line, then, is that your is self-directed or inward in its focus.

Loneliness, in this work at least, is not a paralysis of lost hope, but is, instead, a shaking of self. The “spasm” in the final line refuses to stop, keeping the poem alive in me long after I’ve turned away from the page. An endless quiver –

The poem has more than a touch of greatness in it.