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