"The Years Lie in Wait for you" by Ruth Towne

The Gnostic Gospels No. 1: Thursday means we publish a poem we dig.

Petroglyphs of Nine Mile Canyon, Utah (photo courtesy of https://www.jqjacobs.net/rock_art/fremont.html)

Each Thursday, we’re going to publish a poem: some will be by Holy Gossipers we’ve worked with, others by folks in our community we want to celebrate.

Today, we’re excited to share with you “The Years Lie in Wait for You,” by Ruth Towne.

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The Years Lie in Wait for You
by Ruth Towne 


On every stone a petroglyph,
                          a wheel, a snake, a star.
             They are cut together,
they blink through film projector eye.

             In white clay, selenite, and bone,
in whirlpool curls, in hurricane turns,
             on the sheet-screen,
the images reel until the images unreal.

In mineral, an etch, a groove, a score of earth,
in skin, a crease of the hand, a line at the eye,

one does not catch the pictures flicker,
             nor silk web depart the spinneret.

From lamp to film to lens, the light,
from mind to hand to stone, the relief—

On every stone a petroglyph,
             and under every stone a spring,
                                  silent, cold, and coiling.

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Notice how the poem’s images move like a card trick in a croupier’s hand—how Towne has careful orchestrated this constellation of time and flesh and earth to shuffle in and out. The reader is balanced on an edge of movement and stillness, living body and likeness, momentary and abiding, “the light” and “the relief.” The poem’s zigzag embrace and evasion of inherited syntax give the language a flickering vitality. We love, too, how fully Towne’s poem lives its own life within its seventeen lines, while also reaching out to everything from the tens of thousands of petroglyphs carved into Pueblo ancestral lands to the photographs of Dora Maar to the lines on the palm of the reader as she turns away from the screen to consider her hand. And the line “the images reel until the images unreal” is gonna keep us up at night.

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Ruth Towne is the author of Resurrection of the Mannequins, a poetry collection forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025). Other poems from her collection have been published by the The Lily Poetry Review, Decadent Review, New Feathers Anthology, Coffin Bell Journal, Arboreal Literary Magazine, and Anodyne Magazine. She was the co-editor of poetry for the Stonecoast Literary Review, Issue 21.

Dora Maar, “The Years Lie in Wait for You” 1936