#white buttons

Having been blown away by a book I am in the gutter at the end of the street in little pieces like the alphabet (mother do not worry letters are not flesh though there’s meaning in them but not when they are mean my letters to you were mean I found them after you died and read them and tore them up and fed them to the wind thank you for intruding I love you now leave) Also at the end of the street there is a magnolia tree the white kind that tatters after it blooms so the tree winds up in the street Our naked shivering bodies must be at some distance missing us    come back come back they cry come home put down that book whenever you read you drift away on a raft you like your parrot more than you like me and stuff like that (dear father you always were a bore but I loved you more than interesting things and in your honor I’ve felt the same about myself and everyone I’ve ever met) I like to read in tree houses whenever I can    which is seldom and sometimes never The book that blew me away held all the problems of the world and those of being alive under my nose but I felt far away from them at the same time reading is like that (I am sorry I did not go to your funeral but like you said on the phone an insect cannot crawl to China) Here at the end of the street the insects go on living under the dome of the pacific sky If Mary and Joseph had walked the sixty miles to Bethlehem vertically they would have found themselves floating in the outer pitch of space it would have been cold no inns a long night in the dark endless and when they began to cry the whole world would think something had just been born I like to read into things as I am continually borne forward in time by the winds like the snow (dear sister you were perfect in every way like a baby please tell brother the only reason we never spoke was out of our great love for each other which made a big wind that blew us apart) I think I am coming back I feel shoulders where a parrot could land though a tree would be as good a place as any You cannot teach a tree to talk Trees can say    it is spring but not    though bright sunlight can also be very sad have you noticed? Source: Poetry (September 2011)

- form Mary Ruefle, White Buttons.

Mary Ruefle, from “White Buttons,” published in Poetry

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- from Mary Ruefle, White Buttons.

- form Mary Ruefle, White Buttons.