A Poem from Ruth Danon

A photo from “Landscape and marine views of Norway,” courtesy of the Public Domain Review

 

Craters of ash,
Lost nouns naming and
Renaming themselves,
Unwinding the black ribbon
Around your lonely neck.
You had one finger to the wind.
You had shoes without laces.
You boiled away tea water
Until the pot scorched
Craters into unfathomable
Ash. You stuck your hand
In it. You stuck your fist in.
You scooped something out,
Something hollowed out now,
And unfathomable.

Ruth Danon lives and writes in New York City where she directs Creative and Expository Writing for NYU’s McGhee Division, the undergraduate college for non-traditional students. She is the author of Living With the Fireman (a chapbook), Triangulation from a Known Point (published by Barney Rosset’s North Star Line), and Work in the English Novel. She has published in numerous magazines in the US and abroad, including Mead, Versal, Grey Sparrow Journal, BOMB, Fence, 3rd Bed, The Paris Review, Spazio Humana, and others. A new chapbook, The Echoes, will be published by Traffic Street Press in 2015. Her work appeared in Best American Poetry 2002, edited by Robert Creeley.