Mary Ruefle: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Ruefle, photo by Hannah Ensor, 2017

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Little Stream

 

My heart was bright and shining

like a lobster boiling in water.

And then I was just a child

eating the leftover snow.

I’d lost my mittens and my belly button

was as good as gone, meaning

I couldn’t be born again, ever,

so I sat by a little stream

with my eyes closed.

I saw a woman carrying a child’s coffin

on her head. I saw a rat so friendly

he shined my shoes with his tongue.

I saw my mother leave the room, saying

“Now I am going to go drink some vinegar.”

I saw a surfer drink a wuthering wave

and go down gently into that good night.

I saw the daffodils praying together.

I saw a hummingbird cry out

for a comma between decades.

I saw the quick trimming the hair on their necks

and the wicks of their packaged feet.

I saw something small and in constant danger

of being blown away, like pepper.

I saw a monk set an umbrella on fire, for fun.

I saw an old man dwelling in a tiny fishing village

with a tangible vibrancy that was truly inspiring.

I saw a Venus flytrap eat a cheeseburger.

I saw my struggles were coming to a close.

I saw I would grow so old I would stop wondering

what life on Napa Rui was like, and forget

the first apple tree was in Turkey.

I had the constant feeling something of vital importance

had been lost sight of, was perhaps even gone.

It’s hard to say hello to every atom.

I got to know protozoans, though.

It took three days for my umbilical cord

to swim past. At the end,

the tattered carnation of my navel

seemed most like me, so I threw it in

and at once my eyelids opened,

never to close again.

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Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate. [“Little Stream” from Dunce. ©2019. Printed with permission of the author and Wave Books.]

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                        Hieronymus Bosch, The Concert in the Egg, ca. 1475

Comments

[lally]

fun indeed, thank you

[Gardner McFall]

I love this poem and the Dylan reference, Terence. Great offering.

[Don Berger]

This poem is testament to Mary Ruefle's supremely great imaginative force. We are everywhere during the ride through this poem, in scenes that strangely, constantly startle and thrill. And for all her poetry's magic, its many colors, its extremes, the intense familiarity of the human heart is at its center. One of the greatest times in my life was hearing Ruefle read her poems, which weren't familiar to me then. But now they are, and I'm more alive from knowing them, forever changed.

[Beth J.]

Actually exciting, for what it says and its glittering orignality. So glad to encounter this poem. And the Bosch that is such a good choice with it.

[Grace Cavalieri]

I was wondering where Mary Ruefle went. I missed her work, and she went nowhere at all because Terence brought her to us. Mary teaches us that our imagination is sleeping. Now I am awake to it again. And to the art curator, I could not be more grateful!

[Clarinda]

I am getting my mind gingerly around this jagged marvel of a poem! Curse and bless to Terence for that suggestion about singing it to A Hard Rain. I can’t stop. 👏👏👏

[David Lehman]

Charming poem, and splendid juxtaposition with the Bosch painting. My favorite line: "It’s hard to say hello to every atom."

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Gardner.   Glad you liked it.

[Terence Winch]

Don: Thanks to you for turning me on to her writing. 

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Beth.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Grace. She apparently avoids email and the Internet.

[Terence Winch]

Clarinda: as long as your neighbors don't complain, all should be well.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, David. I imagined the figures in the Bosch painting singing this poem.

[Terence Winch]

Good idea

On Sun, May 8, 2022, 4:31 PM t.p. Winch <tpwinch@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks, Grace. She apparently avoids email and the Internet.

[Amy Gerstler]

Mary Ruefle rules. Her wild mind, her playful/profound ways with line breaks, her ability to let a poem swerve and frisk and plunge, her devotion to freshness of image keeps her work so ALIVE and marvelously, purely her.

[Maureen Owen]

Knocked out of the park! Hats off!

[Bernard Welt]

Mary Rufle may or may not see this, but I am typing on an electronic device to say how much I like this poem, on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd reading. I like a poem that sounds like dream material and I like a poem that out-Dylans Dylan (who may have tried to out-Rimbaud Rimbaud). I like to be thrown for a loop, too.
Mary Rufle wrote me a very kind letter when a poem of mine appeared in BAM (in longhand! see above, "avoids email" etc.) and I have read her ever since. Gladly.
Amy Gerstler: yes, how about those line breaks. I do love them.

[Peter Kearney]

This marvelously creative poem allows the closed eyes of a child to discover an untrammeled imagination. But when the child's eyes are opened, there is no going back, as with Adam and Eve, who could not return to the childhood of Eden.

[Phyllis Rosenzweig]

Loved it. Thanks.