issue 45, 2009
Midnight Ivory by Mary Ruefle
From time to time a painter will pause
and put his paintbrush in his mouth,
not to moisten the brush
but to fill his mouth with fresh hopes.
I am not a painter, but I have a voucher
that allows my face to fill with water
whenever I want for the rest of my life.
Sometimes it fills slowly and sometimes
it fills quickly, the way you never can tell
how long it will take to finish anything.
For example an overamazed and sleepless night
inseparably linked with bitter detail.
It desperately needs more blue.
The bottom two-thirds should be an ocean.
And so I pause here, and put my pen in my mouth.
The way a child pauses when the ocean has
taken his shovel, and then runs into the sea
to retrieve his tool, which is only a toy,
and picks up the hang of swimming in a tag-along
way, and so has an imaginary friend
for life, someone he thinks might save him.
————
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.