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Column 684

Lighter Than Air

Intro by Ted Kooser
04.29.2018

Ruth Stone, who died at age 96 in 2011, was one of our finest poets. I’m espe­cial­ly tak­en with Lighter Than Air.” I love it when there’s an instant at which some­thing mag­i­cal appears and for me it’s those lad­ders reach­ing down toward the girls. The poem is from What Love Comes To: New and Select­ed Poems, from Cop­per Canyon Press. 

Lighter Than Air

The fat girl next door would give us a nickel
to walk to the old man's store
and get her an ice-cream cone,
vanilla, of course, the only flavor then.
On Powotan Avenue, Aunt Harriet and I would take
turns licking it all the way back.
It was hot that summer and we longed
to go to Virginia Beach and put our toes in the tide.
It rained every day and the James River swelled
up to our doorsteps.
Aunt Harriet and I wore tight rubber bathing caps
and long saggy bathing suits. How skinny we were.
She was nine and I was six. The lightning flashed
and we hid in the closet; the thunder crashed.
We had straight, bobbed hair and bangs.
Once a dirigible moved above the tops of the trees,
with little ladders dangling down, and we waved.

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Ruth Stone from What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems, (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). Poem reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.   Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.