(PROSE POEMS)
ELLEN STONE
ELLEN STONE
SUMMER 1972
The empty jar of morning, how it glows. Here they line up on the linen tea towel. My future under glass, its clear blue hue.
If the day is a container, how does it fill? Sweet as raspberry, or the bitterness of crab apple, that pucker whoosh of tongue. Galump of blanched plums and peaches, packed snap of green bean/dill/vinegar.
She stirs the sauce. We dart around her like moths on the summer bulb, barn cats that peek out behind the bales. O’ summer of tomatoes & all that called to us that was green & bruised & crushed.
2.
When you tell me mom is in bed, the words are sticky and cave in around me like the cracks on the asphalt road in late July.
But I am going to drown there –all molasses and sink-mud. I feel it in my marrow, this losing grip on the morning.
What bird trill moment I thought we were promised – the open door, haze above the corn field rows.
3.
Come down to the water. The fish are biting at dusk. Or so dad says. The mosquitoes' hum drones over the tractor out back where Ty is plowing into purple twilight..
It smells like worms here. Frog eggs and tadpole slime. Night comes on, slow as the heron that drifts like catkins off the maples.
The slip of the Susquehanna snakes down from farm field edge like tucked napkins at Granny’s big table, past Terrytown and French Asylum all the way to the Chesapeake.
If the day is a container, how does it fill? Sweet as raspberry, or the bitterness of crab apple, that pucker whoosh of tongue. Galump of blanched plums and peaches, packed snap of green bean/dill/vinegar.
She stirs the sauce. We dart around her like moths on the summer bulb, barn cats that peek out behind the bales. O’ summer of tomatoes & all that called to us that was green & bruised & crushed.
2.
When you tell me mom is in bed, the words are sticky and cave in around me like the cracks on the asphalt road in late July.
But I am going to drown there –all molasses and sink-mud. I feel it in my marrow, this losing grip on the morning.
What bird trill moment I thought we were promised – the open door, haze above the corn field rows.
3.
Come down to the water. The fish are biting at dusk. Or so dad says. The mosquitoes' hum drones over the tractor out back where Ty is plowing into purple twilight..
It smells like worms here. Frog eggs and tadpole slime. Night comes on, slow as the heron that drifts like catkins off the maples.
The slip of the Susquehanna snakes down from farm field edge like tucked napkins at Granny’s big table, past Terrytown and French Asylum all the way to the Chesapeake.
BARN AS CONTAINER
The latched door pulled ajar, sudden shaft of dust-light, golden. Secret pillage filling the storage room, hidden pyramid. Longing for something large, & lasting. Looming. Plunging child-hand, swallowed in silk, dry & smooth as October slipping over the hayfield. Remembering sun-gleam when clouds boil, wind raw in the ravine. Hawk screams, diving above the farthest stretch of grain.
I am a short, narrow container, opened. Feed the cows, horses gathering at dusk, moving stolidly, patient to the sound of my voice. Cluck for them, smooth their noses, quiet.
Back in the coolness of the lower barn, stanchions clink while the Holsteins rustle into new alfalfa. Grain shoveled into troughs. Drinking silent draughts and lying down, filled. Barn quiet nestling into caulked rafters, swallow mud, bats dip at twilight.
Later, the dogs in their coops. Haul water, hold them. Press their silken ears like a rabbit’s foot, for luck. How all the world should be like this. Doghouse stuffed with a tight nest of straw, night coming sharp over the hedgerow, but ready now. Because the chores are done. All the mammals of nighttime settle, breathe like a silent river flowing, contained under winter’s dark ice. And I can sleep now. Held in, kept whole, like barn.
I am a short, narrow container, opened. Feed the cows, horses gathering at dusk, moving stolidly, patient to the sound of my voice. Cluck for them, smooth their noses, quiet.
Back in the coolness of the lower barn, stanchions clink while the Holsteins rustle into new alfalfa. Grain shoveled into troughs. Drinking silent draughts and lying down, filled. Barn quiet nestling into caulked rafters, swallow mud, bats dip at twilight.
Later, the dogs in their coops. Haul water, hold them. Press their silken ears like a rabbit’s foot, for luck. How all the world should be like this. Doghouse stuffed with a tight nest of straw, night coming sharp over the hedgerow, but ready now. Because the chores are done. All the mammals of nighttime settle, breathe like a silent river flowing, contained under winter’s dark ice. And I can sleep now. Held in, kept whole, like barn.
HOMEMAKER
Dawn & the sun, like a lost child comes back through the dense trees, triumphant as if you were wrong about warning what would happen if she did not listen.
At this moment, with the only summer sound a clock beating, dog’s woofs, carpenter nailing the skeletal frame of a house, that lone station wagon white & ghostly drifting down the dirt road you can hear Father ask, “What have you accomplished?” with the breakfast things undone, bread wrapper lying about like a slovenly house guest.
You are not writing sermons, it is true, nor spraying the fruit trees, fleaing the hounds, driving to town to the hardware store for screws. But, look how the refrigerator hums in the light of day, like a satisfied customer. The smooth gleam of the wiped table. How could you ever stop putting things to right? The pine cupboards like a tiny world of their own. Inside, the blue rimmed bowls nest inside each other, symmetrical & silent. No one knows how to preserve the world you have created, but you, your capable hands wringing the same damp dish cloth, over & over.
At this moment, with the only summer sound a clock beating, dog’s woofs, carpenter nailing the skeletal frame of a house, that lone station wagon white & ghostly drifting down the dirt road you can hear Father ask, “What have you accomplished?” with the breakfast things undone, bread wrapper lying about like a slovenly house guest.
You are not writing sermons, it is true, nor spraying the fruit trees, fleaing the hounds, driving to town to the hardware store for screws. But, look how the refrigerator hums in the light of day, like a satisfied customer. The smooth gleam of the wiped table. How could you ever stop putting things to right? The pine cupboards like a tiny world of their own. Inside, the blue rimmed bowls nest inside each other, symmetrical & silent. No one knows how to preserve the world you have created, but you, your capable hands wringing the same damp dish cloth, over & over.
HOW TO THINK ABOUT BLUE
HOW TO THINK ABOUT BLUE
A stitch in time saves blue before it slides from shale into opaque. Those curved edges that were sharp, razor words that cut your softness, your girl-shape blending into whirl-like branching, a multitude of currents. How creeks diverge where brook rock binds them. How you can’t stop yourself blunting feeling until you are a piece of flotsam in the hoary world, all the water flowing over you tossing you in tiny somersaults. Little bead,
my alphabet, green lake glass heart swirling every which way. O weariness, O weeping – there is a reason we are made of water, & green & blue are likely ranked the favorites as colors go. How can I keep you from going on helter-skelter, to the dam, the overflow? Quick, here’s a magic ring. It’s clear & made of nothing, but feels like blue, the kind sky is made of, not your heart, your sorrys, not your never minds. Wish on it like Mr. Bear.
Maybe it will listen. Believe it like a two-year old, mouthing stories out the window. What else do you have to go on – the watery world that keeps flowing, the green banks you want to hang on to, sink your small hands into deep like horsetail moss, moments you remember along the way, believed in once. I am not a raft, a paper sailboat, but blue is under you, the road, a river carves down to the sea. Blue, a cloud boat high above you,
a place called next time, over there, eventually. Tie a string to blue & let it float you. Glass when tumbled does not end up cutting. What blue can do for you – mirror like pond edge, boat dock, harbor. Be blue & bluster, fog & heartache. Sing the blues & let them fester. All the world is water, you included. Rain is blue, your tears like fingers holding on, bobbing through blue light shore, a blanket, green, your lantern-glow.
my alphabet, green lake glass heart swirling every which way. O weariness, O weeping – there is a reason we are made of water, & green & blue are likely ranked the favorites as colors go. How can I keep you from going on helter-skelter, to the dam, the overflow? Quick, here’s a magic ring. It’s clear & made of nothing, but feels like blue, the kind sky is made of, not your heart, your sorrys, not your never minds. Wish on it like Mr. Bear.
Maybe it will listen. Believe it like a two-year old, mouthing stories out the window. What else do you have to go on – the watery world that keeps flowing, the green banks you want to hang on to, sink your small hands into deep like horsetail moss, moments you remember along the way, believed in once. I am not a raft, a paper sailboat, but blue is under you, the road, a river carves down to the sea. Blue, a cloud boat high above you,
a place called next time, over there, eventually. Tie a string to blue & let it float you. Glass when tumbled does not end up cutting. What blue can do for you – mirror like pond edge, boat dock, harbor. Be blue & bluster, fog & heartache. Sing the blues & let them fester. All the world is water, you included. Rain is blue, your tears like fingers holding on, bobbing through blue light shore, a blanket, green, your lantern-glow.
YOUR GRANDPA WAS A FOXHUNTER
I’ll fashion my daughters a cave made of fox skins my dad hung to cure from the old cellar rafters. The mink and the muskrat will cloak them in night reeds. They’ll bathe with cool moonlight in pools still and quiet. Now ones fully shrouded, they’ll slip through the cornfields and eat with the ravens. Run sleek like coyote and stalk the night bobcat. My girls, can I give you my past as protection? A shotgun, an old truck, the men at the diner who knew your great granddad who preached all those sermons – how Jesus would keep us as safe in his bosom as Granny kept Sunday the Lord’s day as holy. The people who raised me take fear as prediction, as God’s word, His only. For girls to be furtive, claws showing, teeth shining might be their salvation, their way of surviving. I’ll take my chances and teach them that hunting is deep in their blood line -- the body as beast, if need be -- when wolf men come a calling.
Ellen said this about her poems: "Words, like land, calm and center me. Poetry, the stability of metaphoric language helps me navigate. My thinking tends to be anchored in the landscape I grew up in, the hills above the north branch of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. However, I have been a Midwesterner for most of my life now, so my beliefs have expanded, too, like the broad landscapes of the prairie states. I want poetry to both help me understand, and challenge complacency - words as change agent, words as emissary of hope - especially in this time of divisiveness and danger in our country."
Ellen Stone teaches at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her poems have appeared lately in Passages North, The Collagist, The Citron Review, The Museum of Americana, and Fifth Wednesday. She is the author of The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press, 2013). Ellen’s poetry has been nominated twice for a Pushcart prize and twice for Best of the Net.