Ruth Daigon

Ruth Daigon, winner of the Ann Stanford Poetry Award, in 1997 also the "The Greensborough Poetry Prize. Prior to her career in poetry she was a professional singer: a Columbia Recording Artist, a guest artist on CBS's Camera Three, a soloist with the New York Pro Musica. In the late seventies, she made the transition to full time poet, editor, performance artist. She was founder/editor of the poetry publication Poets On: for the 20 years of its lifetime. Daigon is a regular on the Internet with 3 chapbooks on Web Del Sol, Pares Cum Paribus (Chile) and The Alsop Review plus numerous publications in hard copy magazines and anthologies. Her most recent book Between One Future And The Next, Papier-Mache Press, was published in 1995. Her latest book "The Moon Inside" was published in 1999 by Gravity/Newton's Baby followed by "Payday At The Triangle" based on the Triangle Shirtwaist factory Fire in New York City, 1911 where 146 young people, mostly immigrants, perished. Her latest book 'HANDFULS OF TIME" just appeared on the horizon published by Small Poetry Press, Select Poets Series.

The Book Translation Program of the U.S. State Department has begun an educational series with countries over seas and they have included her poetry in the first book of modern American poets which they are sending to Thailand as part of an educational series. This book has about fifty of the top American poets as an example of what is happening to modern American poetry. We, the poets have our poems presented first in English ,of course, then translated, and analyzed with commentaries ".....Ruth Daigon's work is a long drink of cold crystalline spring water....clear without being shallow; direct without simplification... Her poems are like small very sharp knives that peel back clutter, enabling the
reader to see beneath the daily surface of the ordinary.." --Marge Piercy

E-mail Ruth at RUTHART@aol.com

THE MILLENNIUM

Let there be cool linen
and lovers resting between sheets
humming a small heaven between them

Let there be a settlement of snow
long green veils of rain
and radiant squalors

Let there be moon-plucked waves
and thick-tongued leaves
that whisper sleep's dark flower

Let the pulse beat within us
rich as salt, hot as sun
giving time its edge

Let us steep tansy, coriander
and cloves in wine
drinking deep its magic cures

Let us bring the knower to the known
to inhale love as sweet as canldewick
and what waits is just a breath away

IN MY BODY OF SKIN

When I was a nightingale, I sang.
When I was a serpent, I swallowed,
my voice, spume blown from a wave
a sound too thin for earthworms.

In my body of skin, of moss, of clover
I touch fingers with fingers
lips with lips
the exposed tip of the heart.

With memories older than Prometheus
I remember the time when time was birthed
the sky appeared
sudden light
the wind and water
where blind valves closed
on a single grain of sand.

Seed work sun work earth work.
If pansies are for thoughts
pick them early in the morning
so they last.

Lake-summer days I climb the hill
drink the sky and pose like Millet's peasant
listening to an invisible lark.

With a pocketful of seeds, I sit
peeling an orange under a static sun
attentive to the sound of pine cones clicking open.

The child sleeps in my shadow
and walks beside me
following from birth and
moving as I move.
We cling together like small animals, trembling
and the well is dry the cup empty

and gravity's a long way down

NOT YET VISIBLE

Father balances on scaffolding
high above her games.
Each time he spits a nail
and drives it in
a wall goes up.
Room dividers rise
from hopscotch squares
the whole house framed on stilts.

He climbs the ladder
waves from every window
until she catches his signal
return it and find herself
waving from our top floor
at his bent frame growing smaller
as he moves along receding avenues.

She looks out
signaling her sons
who for a moment
recognize her, signal back
then shift into a new position
straining to see something
not yet visible.

ANCIENT ROUNDS

I wake early, climb
the oak's thick trunk
up to its sweet armpit.

No one looks for me
among the brittle leaves,
the furthest tip of air.

I'm living in the the present tense
a bird hanging midair
frozen inside the moment

or outside the elements
like an apple spinning in space
unnoticed but familiar as a breath.

Although grass doesn't feel its color
nor the lilac its scent
light enters through my open lens.

The year makes perfect circles,
hours cabled to the sun
or cool as a daytime moon.

Snow-scented, leaf-smoked,
a blending of decays returns me
to earth's old sap and flow.

Again I'm short-sleeved in
October, snow-bound in December.
Again I'm seventeen
and old and wise as all of womankind.

REPOSITIONING THE MATTRESS

We pivot around each other
not even our shadows collide.
Dust lifts and settles like the first
snow as we shift through
margins of air and islands of time.

Flipping it over, each wrist
with its bracelet of flesh,
each finger shaped by its bone, we're
upending the days,
exploring the spaces between.

After the long night and porcelain dreams,
after rivers of sleep, morning
hangs by a thread.
Face to face, we imagine our bodies
stored in hollows,
secret deposits deep in the foam.

The day has no beginnings-
sky goes everywhere at once
in turquoise innocence.
Warmth rises. Sweat gleams
and the echo of our interlocking rhythms
pulse through vacant rooms.

This house is what it is,
each wall stands alone
each window with a sky of its own
and we are reaching backwards, love,
in a seethe of memories
that ache like static from another world.

This old mattress grown heavy with meaning,
lopsided with usage,
slopes into a cave
where we tumble like children
in salt waters of the heart.

BACK

Back
reversing the flow
back through the looking glass
up from the rabbit hole
in from out there.

Back
into the stunned silence
of snow, a gray quiet
a stripping clean to the roots
and our breath making perfect circles.

Back
to Main Street
with summer twilight
spreading like fire in dry grass,
the soft susurrus of a slow leak in the day.

My hands
stretching like antennae
now in this street
now in that.

Back
to wrap that child's universe
around me once again
and warm this woman's frame.

HOW OLD WOULD YOU BE IF YOU DIDN'T KNOW HOW OLD YOU WAS?
(Satchel Paige)

A door in a sudden garden swings open
and everything comes back.

Ma's wheedling: C'mon Cookie.
Smile for the camera.
Sing a song.

The rock I'm standing on,
smooth
hot.
The sun bouncing off my Buster Brown,
I sing and Mr. Shucket
hands me a dollar.

Pa, just up from the city,
crouches in the lake
washing his arms past
his carpenter tan.
Then, swimming with eyes shut,
he splashes everyone.

Friday, I can hardly wait for Friday.
Every other day's like
jumping up and down
on one foot in the same spot
but Friday pa arrives from the city.
Friday the butcher come to kill chickens.

Stay in front, ma yells
from the back but I crawl
through dirt underneath the house
to watch the headless chickens dance.

I spin like them,
flop in the grass,
split a blade down the middle,
whistle through it
and the sun spills its miracles on me.

If I never learned to count,
I'd be back in that feathered time
with nothing to forget,
nothing to recall,
starting all over again.

MISSING

We're still waiting,
less radiant, less sure.
It grows dark. We light candles.

Cousins, strange in serious suits,
fold their hands on their laps
and sing old, familiar songs.

Sleep
Sleep
the grass is growing
and a single bird tests the air
reminding us today is all there is.

Sleep
Sleep
The grass is growing
and the well's not deep enough
to drown the moon.

Light condenses
Doors swing open
but the guest is
not yet visible.

The dream still in our mouths,
we drift to a room where the thin
gruel of early morning light
falls on a scarred table top
and a white plate

with its burden of black bread.
Now we keep very still
and wait for the missing one
to come again and share
this heavy loaf of silence.

It Is Enough

It is enough to lean against
the fabric of your flesh.
It is enough to lie
in the domestic morning.

It is enough to watch light
expand through windows
rising and falling
between our bodies on this bed,
this room this continent.

We grow wise watching leaky faucets,
faded wallpaper, mismatched socks.
The coffee boiling on the stone
prepares us for the network news,
shopping malls, miracle cures
and tomorrow always sitting on our bed.

But in this rush of years,
we have not lost the pure imagined past,
the here-it-is, the pitch, the pinnacle
of time shining from within a million
summers or the music so intense it disappears.

We invent a lifetime out of small things,
free the air between our fingers,
diagram the star, dream them into
daylight and admit the future
which is here, always here
like clock that runs forever.

Midnight

rain walks across the roof
safe within the house's heart
we hear a breathing at the keyhole
and leave the door open
where anything may enter

in a night all sweat and shoulders
liquid syllables fill the air
i taste the husk of your voice
hold the bulk of your body
as a glove holds the shape of a hand

the dark expands
we're tightrope walkers
balancing on silence and in this place
no doors no windows
and the world does not arrive

as the rain rains
flowers wither
small animals die
spring ripens into summer
in a pause that lasts forever

unlight melts on my hands
and wild geese lather the sky
i hear the stroke of grass on grass
as morning makes an entrance
with fur and feathers in its hair

FIRST TIME

The sun makes a crystal continent
of our pond. A hint of uninhabited
space stains the surface. Trees
resolve the pattern of our days
branching out beyond our view.

The weather vane, scarred by winter,
grinds slowly on its swivel.
No one remembers the wind and
one arrangement leads to another
around the hot circumference of days.

But the spacious season, kindling
and simmering, cools. Frost sets in
leaving a garden of bare spines, brittle
stalks and heapings of salt hay.

I watch the grass grow blades of ice
and my own reflection in the window
like a dim star that sees beyond
its own light for the first time.