Humus
Let the space
between tree and “tree”
be humus.
Let the space between us
fill with roots
that are (not) mine.
Let form come from this exact
place, be knit
to this tree’s branching
as close as bark.
Because nothing is another thing
or a puppy of our thoughts
but only this
happening here between us:
let me grow a word for this.
Welcome, everyone! I’ve changed the website a bit because I’ve been seeing lots of visitors, yay! and would like to make it easier to use and for you to find my poetry. Probably the best introduction to me and my work is this short video that was made on the winter solstice in 2014. So…
I’m so moved by these early responses to CRAZING! (Please contact me if you would like a review copy!) From Jessamyn Smyth, author of Kitsune: These poems vibrate on the page with essential, powerful life-force, in language as playful and gorgeously-lit as it is sharply wise. Thompson’s work offers multiple intelligences we direly need in…
The lovely review of Crazing just published in Story Circle Book Reviews begins: “Ruth Thompson’s third volume of poetry looks at aging through lenses of nature—drought ravages, fragments of a decayed fish—gently showing the human mind dropping pieces, the human body changing shape. Taking shape often looks like losing shape; we are called here to…
Travel Instructions for Elmwood Avenue You leave the sepia light of the tea restaurant,lapsang and peony, earth and green twig,continuo of quiet human voices. Outside is rain, fat frying, damp exhaust, sputum,spit of tires on a wet street, brakes tunedto the pulse of streetlights: green, amber, red, green. You blunder, glasses fringed with rainbows,until your…
The Inventor of the LuVailean Sonnet She was no Millay, my Great-Aunt Lucy, but she named herself Lyra LuVaile, Poet Laureate of Long Beach, California, and wrote a book in which she speaks familiarly of Stars, the Cosmos, the Music of the Spheres – subjects I might write about, myself, though not perhaps so familiarly….
Video from reading in November, 2014, at Why There Are Words in Sausalito. Such a fun evening! (The whole thing only runs 9 minutes, so enjoy!)