"I Cannot Be Quiet an Hour" by Mary Ruefle

[View this email on a browser]( [Forward to a friend]( [facebook-icon]( [tumblr-icon]( [twitter-icon]( January 31, 2018 [I Cannot Be Quiet an Hour]( [Mary Ruefle]( I begin to talk to violets. Tears fall into my soup and I drink them. Sooner or later everyone donates something. I carry wood, stone, and hay in my head. The eyes of the violets grow very wide. At the end of the day I reglue the broken foot of the china shepherd who has put up with me. Next door, in the house of the clock-repairer, a hundred clocks tick at once. He and his wife go about their business sleeping peacefully at night. [Like this on Facebook]( [Share via Twitter]( Copyright © 2018 Mary Ruefle. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem “Regarding this poem, I have very little to say. I tend to forget my poems as soon as they are written, but I am very happy while writing them. I do love how things we saw many, many years ago can suddenly crop up in a poem we wrote yesterday, and that happened here. I was once in the house of a clock-repairer and asked him how he could sleep with all that ticking—there were hundreds of working clocks on the walls—and he told me he was so used to it he had no problem at all. Me, I bury my alarm clock every night, as I cannot bear to hear the ticking!” —Mary Ruefle [Mary Ruefle]( Mary Ruefle’s most recent book is My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016). She lives in Bennington, Vermont. Photo credit: Michelle Eikenbary [more-at-poets]( [My Private Property]( Poetry by Ruefle [My Private Property]( (Wave Books, 2016) "Staring into the Sun" by Jennifer Grotz [read-more]( "26" by Rachel Eliza Griffiths [read-more]( "The Epistemology of Rosemary" by Geffrey Davis [read-more]( January Guest Editor: Kaveh Akbar Thanks to Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about [Akbar]( and our other [guest editors for the year.]( Help Support Poem-a-Day If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a [monthly donation]( or [one-time gift]( to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today’s poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! [Small-Blue-RGB-poets.org-Logo]( Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit [Poets.org](. You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click [here](. © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038 From Our Sponsors [Advertisement](