Spy Poetry: Train Ride by Ruth Stone

Editor’s Note: There are always at least two ways of looking at things; if you’re a poet, sometimes 13! (Read Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.) The speaker in this poem conceives of life as being simultaneously momentary and infinite, suggesting that the truth of our existence embraces these opposites.

Train Ride

All things come to an end;
small calves in Arkansas,
the bend of the muddy river.
Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever.
They go on forever, the swamp,
the vine-choked cypress, the oaks
rattling last year’s leaves,
the thump of the rails, the kite,
the still white stilted heron.
All things come to an end.
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever,
the wide dry field of geese,
a man stopped near his porch
to watch. Release, release;
between cold death and a fever,
send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.

Ruth Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1915 and died in 2011. She attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She lived in a rural farmhouse in Vermont for much of her life and received widespread recognition relatively late with the publication of Ordinary Words (1999). The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was soon followed by other award-winning collections, including In the Next Galaxy (2002), winner of the National Book Award; In the Dark (2004); and What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems (2008). She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her poem “Train Ride” is included in In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press, 2002). Posted here with permission of the publisher.