The Ferryer (audio only)
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(Ruth Stone, June 8, 1915 - November 19, 2011) And suddenly, it's today, it's this morning they are putting Ruth into the earth, her breasts going down, under the hill, like the moon and sun going down together. O I know, it's not Ruth—what was Ruth went out, slowly, but this was her form, beautiful and powerful as the old, gorgeous goddesses who were terrible, too, not telling a lie for anyone—and she'd been left here so long, among mortals, by her mate—who could not, one hour, bear to go on being human. And I've gone a little crazy myself with her going, which seems to go against logic, the way she has always been there, with her wonder, and her generousness, her breasts like two voluptuous external hearts. I am so glad she kept them, all her life, and she got to be buried in them— she 96, and they maybe 82, each, which is 164 years of pleasure and longing. And think of all the poets who have suckled at her riskiness, her risque, her body politic, her outlaw grace! What she came into this world with, with a mew and cry, she gave us. In her red sweater and her red hair and her raw melodious Virginia crackle, she emptied herself fully out into her songs and our song-making, we would not have made our songs without her. O dear one, what is this? You are not a child, though you dwindled, you have not retraced your path, but continued to move straight forward to where we will follow you, radiant mother. Red Rover, cross over.
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But I love the I, steel I-beam that my father sold. They poured the pig iron into the mold, and it fed out slowly, a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened, Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream of Wheat, its curl of butter right in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning and sour in the evening. I love the I, frail between its flitches, its hard ground and hard sky, it soars between them like the soul that rushes, back and forth, between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other, how would it have felt to be the strut joining the floor and roof of the truss? I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled slope of her temperature rising, and on the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach the crest, the Roman numeral I-- I, I, I, I, girders of identity, head on, embedded in the poem. I love the I for its premise of existence--our I--when I was born, part gelid, I lay with you on the cooling table, we were all there, a forest of felled iron. The I is a pine, resinous, flammable root to crown, which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.
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