Ruth L. Schwartz

Beauty: 1976

Those winding roads where we stuck out / our thumbs to any cars that came.

Anything For Love

When I was eight, I was so obsessed with Erich Segal’s novel Love Story that I memorized the first few paragraphs and recited them at every opportunity: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she loved Mozart. And Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”

Sundays With Hugo

This is how I met Hugo: I pick up strange men in my car, sometimes two or three at a time. I drive to the parts of town where they offer their bodies: on street corners, outside the paint store and Home Depot and U-Haul. When I slow down, they cluster around like — I was going to say, “like flies around a plate of fruit” or “like bees around a flower,” but the truth is, they swarm my car like men desperate for work. Hugo was so bold he just opened my passenger door and climbed right in.

I had been sad for so long that it shocked me,

the enormous yellow moon / balanced like a honeydew / on the hill’s knife-edge, / fat and implacable.

Why I Moved To The Country

I moved to the country after living in Oakland, California, for the better part of twenty-five years, adoring and defending my troubled city as if it were my wayward though generous lover.

The Return

This is what life does, as an act of great / though often misunderstood kindness — it brings us / over and over again to the same sorrows.

When We Tell The Truth

Flight

In India

Afterward