Poetry by Ellen Stone

                 ​Pawel Maryanov CC



Rain clouds over I 94 

                                             For Wesley Blake Wellborn
                                                  1993—2021

I don’t know why I thought of you this morning, Blake
with storm clouds still settling above the slick highway,

the soft white belly of a plane sinking onto the runway
over the ridge. But you were there just then in the jet’s 

descent, your voice, polite, its quiet drawl. I think it was
the way the airplane glided in as if it was not a miracle,

but something we were meant to do. I thought of how 
you must have been when you were young, a boy down

there in Alabama, probably so full of awe as all kids are
of things with wings that fill the sky.  I saw your face

there, too, the easy placid way it held the room, the air
not quite aware of you, or who you could become.

You were sweet butter when you talked, how much 
you likely kept inside, contoured to fit the shapes others

build to keep us all contained.  Somehow, we lost
you to the metaled world, its sharp and hardened edges.

I know I did nothing to help you as you lived, Blake. 
But I feel you settling down into the tawny fields, trees,

the river there to hold you finally when we cannot.
The plane coming in, rain splintering off its windshield

refusing to stick, earth deciding what remains, what floats
above us, hovering, maybe forever, even without our say.





Depression as guest

In a picnic Polaroid down on the farm, all of us wince
into the lemon light of May. The yard, new with green,

table laid with Tupperware. You can’t see people much,
but here the macaroni salad peeks out next to my sister

stuffed in near Granny wearing pink in glasses pointy
as triangles. We carry out what was inside all winter. 

Chairs, cabbage from the cold room – sliced thin
folded into vinegar, Hellman’s, and fried chicken,

rhubarb cake, Wise chips. And, Mom is there, isn’t she?
The halo of her hair somewhere. Dad, too, in his tee shirt.

It’s Memorial Day. We spent the morning in the garden
planting. It’s celebration time after Grant took flowers

up to all the graves. And, somehow, this is when she comes
to all the holidays, D. who stands off to the side, planted 

there like some odd tree. No one seems to question it.
She is morose, buts she is family, so in she comes. And she 

sits down.  Evermore, we add her in, her troubled stare.
And rumpled clothes.  She sleeps all day, then joins us.

For the special days. So, holidays will never be the same.
I understand it now. Along with joy, we have to think of her. 




Ellen Stone advises a poetry club at Community High School and co-hosts a monthly poetry series, Skazat! in Ann Arbor, Michigan where she taught special education in the public schools and raised three daughters with her husband. Ellen is the author of What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020) and The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press, 2013). Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Ellen can be contacted at www.ellenstone.org.
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