There are explorer poets. Like Hannah Weiner who invited us into her acid trip and Bernadette Mayer who invited us into her mid-winter day, Michael Ruby invites us behind his closied eyes. In previous books, Michael has explored the words of The Star Spangled Banner, inspiration on the New York City subway, and the landscapes of Maine whose features formed his poems. In Michael Ruby’s new book, Close Your Eyes, Visions there is another geography to be explored limitless with imagination.
In a preface to Close Your Eyes, the poet explains: “In the early 2000s, I wrote a trilogy, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices, that collected fleeting memories, dreams and the voices we briefly hear as we’re falling asleep. Afterward, I turned my attention to another short-lived internal phenomenon, the colors and shapes and occasional images we see with our eyes closed. These fragmentary visions surely are a source of abstract visual art, just as dreams are a source of fiction and inner voices are a source of poetic lines. I began each session of dictation with the mantra, Close your eyes.”
As a meditation this morning, I opened Close Your Eyes, Visions, and turned to a random page to read the poem there. It reminded me a bit of the old days, in my early twenties, when I used to throw I Ching, out of happenstance getting a direction.
In the middle of one page, here were the lines:
The world is orange and black, dense orange and black dots, with something whipping through them, wind or water or an invisible animal.
I liked those lines very much and turned to another page. Here, vision 26:
The world is gold,…. gold……sparkling on a black or red background… gold sparkling on a black background, which is itself a black background.
The world is orange with a precipice at……the top. A black precipice. Black water arching down. … A black cataract.
Each constellation of small stars is a different insect, creeping along the ground, the yellow ground.
And here is another vision:
Close your eyes.…… There’s a silver net in front of a black world.……Purple flowers grow in the black. ………A horizontal bar of light crosses the black. ………….Silver stalks grow out of the black earth.… Light. …Just light. ….A flower of light in the very middle of the black.
……………………..Green lily pads with pale yellow flowers cover the surface now………. Something blinding from…….. above.……A silver horizontal bar rises, pulsing. ………Something blinding. …………..The sun, at the other end of a valley, shines in my eyes.
And another:
Close your eyes……… ……. Two black dots cling to each other…..The more the world trembles, the more they cling…….The world turns the color of butter.
……………………..The orange world is spattered with bright red. Bright red powder. …………….Yellow feathers.……..Yellow scales.
Though the poems form an introspective narrative, linear in time, each poem is its own person, its own vision. While I read, it’s like having a kaleidoscope for eyes. In the Vimeo below, Michael Ruby reads from his new book. Close your eyes. Enjoy.
Close Your Eyes, Visions in published by Station Hill Press. You can check them out here:
Green Kill Sessions presented VISIONS, a live stream on Friday, March 21, 2025, at 8 p.m., from Green Kill gallery in Kingston, N.Y., based on the second part of Michael Ruby’s book, CLOSE YOUR EYES, VISIONS (Station Hill Press, 2024). The performance included Ruby reading, visuals by Green Kill’s David Schell and music by the Other Arc Ensemble, including Jed Shahar, Jeffrey Joe Nelson, Edmund Berrigan and Benjamin Miller. The text is a series of hypnagogic poems about the brief visions we see with our eyes closed, beginning outside a candy store in New Jersey and ending in an accident on a country road in upstate New York.
