STAN SANVEL RUBIN
Photography © by Tammy Ruggles from RSR Featured Art Gallery
Read Before Playing
The rules include never having to say you’re sorry.
The rules include knowing you should be sorry.
The rules include feeling sorry without knowing why.
This is too bad, if you want simple rules
go somewhere that has simple rules,
rules that are easier to understand,
the way you can understand the difference
between day and night, which is easy
except in certain latitudes where at midnight
the sky is lit by yellow fire or the Polar sky
darkens everything and turns day to night
like a filmmaker shooting to save money,
only there is no cinematographer, no director
to hold accountable, just the darkening
so that your life slows down to shadow
or quickens to shadow, you can’t know which,
you can’t know whether you follow it or it follows you.
Either way you can’t keep up, can you?
Lucky You
The story of my life
would bore you
if you had
time to hear me tell it
the way I might
right now
if I trusted you,
but I don’t,
you can just get up
and walk away
like a person
who stole a drink
at a party he
wasn’t invited to
but happened
to pass by
and took a shot
at something that
looked promising
on such a hot day
but wasn’t.
An Elegy For My Elegy
When I step back
I step across a grave,
the one I dug
by stepping forward.
I have buried parents
under stone,
seen the gray dust
of a loved wife
settle in a plastic bag
inside a set
of plastic urns
she chose for this,
nested like words,
one inside
the other.
My own death
weighs on my tongue
like a small piercing
made of titanium
and silence
no one knows is there.
My final breath
will slip over it and be gone,
a secret held no more.
So it’s not as earth
or ash we end,
but indecipherable consequence,
a hash of language and desire
punctuated by the slow
forfeiture of meaning
which was implicit
in the contract
I never signed.
Documents
There’s always the document of silence.
And the mountain.
There’s the document of pain.
And its children.
They identify you
before you can identify yourself.
They ring your head with sorrow
even you don’t see.
There are no words for this
and everybody knows them.
Stan Sanvel Rubin’s poems have appeared most recently in America Journal of Poetry, Watershed Review, Gravel and Hubbub and are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest and Open Journal of Arts and Letters. His fourth full-length collection, There. Here., was published by Lost Horse Press (2013). His third, Hidden Sequel, won the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. He lives on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.
