2 Ruth Stone Poems

Compulsive Organizer

When you. as they say, pass on,
all of your files and categories
will go blind. For who reads
method that figures the invisible
structures of the dead and gone?
Even your cabinets, your hungers,
your decisions to take a bath
or a shower, or use perfume,
will crash into chaos. Order -
exquisitely tuned to your gastric juices,
to your tactile cravings, to the mad
lurches of your infancy, to your need
to consume it all and be forgiven.

Pokeberries

I started out in the Virginia mountains
with my grandma’s pansy bed
and my Aunt Maud’s dandelion wine.
We lived on greens and backfat and biscuits.
My Aunt Maud scrubbed right through the linoleum.
My daddy was a northerner who played drums
and chewed tobacco and gambled.
He married my mama on the rebound.
Who would want an ignorant hill girl with red hair?
They took a Pullman up to Indianapolis
and someone stole my daddy’s wallet.
My whole life has been stained with pokeberries.
No man seemed right for me. I was awkward
until I found a good wood burning stove.
There is no use asking what it means.
With my first piece of ready cash I bought my own
place in Vermont; kerosene lamps, dirt road.
I’m sticking here like a porcupine up a tree.
Like the one our neighbor shot. Its bone and skin
hung there for three years in the orchard.
No amount of knowledge can shake my grandma out of me;
or my Aunt Maud; or my mama, who didn’t just bite an apple
with her big white teeth. She split it in two.