Mary Ruefle - Blog Posts

brittcbeast

7 months ago

I was born shy, congenitally unable to do anything
profitable, to see anything in color, to love plums,
with a marked aversion to traveling around the room,
which is perfectly normal in infants.
Who wrote this? were my first words.
I did not like to be torched.
More snow fell than was able to melt,
I became green-eyed and in due time traveled
to other countries where I formed opinions
on hard, cold, shiny objects and soft, warm,
nappy things. Late in life I began to develop
a passion for persimmons and was absolutely delighted
when a postcard arrived for the recently departed.
I became recalcitrant, spending more and more time
with my rowboat. All my life I thought polar bears
and penguins grew up together playing side by side
on the ice, sharing the same vista, bits of blubber
and innocent lore. One day I read a scientific journal;
there are no penguins at one pole, no bears
on the other. These two, who were so long intimates
in my mind, began to drift apart, each on his own floe,
far out into the glacial seas. I realized I was becoming
impossible, more and more impossible,
and that one day it really would be true.

how i became impossible by Mary Ruefle

Tags

poetry penguins mindfulness theinterconnectedness mary ruefle polar bears penguins and polar bears becoming impossible

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aquueerius

3 years ago

this is probably a longshot but recently I read a poem titled something like “the last thing she sees”……. and its like. from the perspective of a bird on a birdfeeder in someones yard… and the bird is the last thing that sees the person alive before they pass away / the last thing the person sees but obviously the bird has no way of knowing that. anwyays like. i have been thinking about it for two days straight but like a fool i neglected to save it and so now here i am on tumblr dot com asking if youve heard of this poem