Ellen Bass: Indigo

As I'm walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs
toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers

with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping,

which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse

of its almost translucent eyelids. the father is young,

a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed

from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms,

saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce

his lobes and his sunglaasses testify

to the radiance haloed around him. I'm so jealous.

As I often am. It's a kind of obsession.

I want him to have been my child's father.

I want to have married a man who wanted

to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much

that he marked it up like a book, underlining,

highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.

Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always

fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours

on his zafu chanting om and then went out

and broke his hand punching the car.

I imagine when this galloping man gets home

he's going to want to have sex with his wife,

who slept in late, and then he'll eat

barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone

while he drinks a dark beer. I can't stop

wishing my daughter had had a father like that.

I can't stop wishing I'd had that life. Oh, I know

it's a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.

It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.

First there was the war and then just waiting.

And my mother's bones so narrow, she had to be slit

and I airlifted. that anyone is born,

each precarious success from sperm and egg

to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.

And here I am, alive.

Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.

Not the car I totaled running a stop sign

or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.

Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly

where I was standing--my best friend shoving me

backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.

I'm alive.

And I gave birth to a child.

So she didn't get a father who'd sling her

onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn't get.

I've cried most of my life over that.

And now there's everything that we can't talk about.

We love--but cannot take

too much of each other.

Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me

if I no longer had my mind--

we were on our way into Ross,

shopping for dresses. That's something

she likes and they all look adorable on her--

she's the only one 

who didn't hesitate or refuse

or waver or flinch.

As we strode across the parking lot

she said, OK, but when's the cutoff?

That's what I need to know.

Ellen Bass: I Could Touch It

When she was breaking apart, my son was falling in love.

She lay on the couch with a heated sack of rice on her belly,
sometimes dozing, sometimes staring out the window at the olive tree

as it broke into tiny white blossoms, as it swelled into bitter black fruit.

At first, I wanted to spare him.
I wished he was still farming up north, tucking bulbs of green onions
into their beds and watering the lettuce,
his hands gritty, his head haloed in a straw hat.

But as the months deepened, I grew selfish.

I wanted him here with his new love.
When I passed the open bathroom door, I wanted
to see them brushing their teeth,

one perched on the toilet lid, one on the side of the tub,
laughing and talking through their foamy mouths,
toothbrushes rattling against their teeth.

Like sage gives its scent when you crush it. Like stone
is hard. They were happy and I could touch it.

Ellen Bass: Goat, Cow, Man

After the mob murdered the man for eating
a cow, it was found to be meat
from a goat. Why can I not
stop thinking about it—
the stringy flesh inside his gut,
and the microbes run riot when his heart
stopped—how fast they started
breaking down the blood-clotted
muscle of his stomach, slick intestines,
as though they were meant
to destroy the evidence of human—what
can I call it? sin? the curse of certainty? some twist
in the helix that insists on splitting
us apart?—the cow is not the goat. I am not
you. The man is a few inches of old newsprint,
a knot of hair, eye sockets,
but I keep picturing that
kitchen, his wife and children stuttering,
it’s goat, it’s goat,
and the goat, her white
coat, the little kernels of her teeth,
her pale slitted eyes.

Ellen Bass: Failure

I looked like a woman. I’d begun
to bleed, something I’d wanted with a fervor,
like the fervor with which I burned
to kiss Earl Freeman, to smell his man sweat
and finger the hollow at his breastbone
when we lay in the hot sand in Atlantic City,
the white sky arched over us. I was in such a hurry
to grow up, my mother said. But I was innocent
in the sense of not yet guilty
as I lifted the spoonful of oatmeal
to my father’s lips
the day he came home from the hospital.
My mother had to go back to work—
Hy-Grade Wines and Liquors,
which paid for the brown Formica table and pink
refrigerator, pink dishwasher. We’d moved
from the apartment over the store
into a house with a front door.
I wanted people to ring the bell
and I’d answer it like on TV.
It didn’t seem like it would be too hard
to feed my father. I can do it,
I assured my mother.
I think I may see us there forever, my weak father
in pajamas, me holding
the spoon of thin oatmeal, lifting it
to his lips and the lips not
taking it, not really willing or
unwilling. So the gruel
slid back out again, dribbling
down his badly shaved chin and he
not doing anything to stop it. My father.
I left him there. This was my first
entrance into the land of failure, a country
I would visit so often
it would begin to feel like home.

Ellen Bass: Sleeping With you

Is there anything more wonderful?
After we have floundered

through our separate pain

we come to this. I bind myself to you,

like otters wrapped in kelp, so the current

will not steal us as we sleep.

Through the night we turn together,

rocked in the shallow surf,

pebbles polished by the sea.

Ellen Bass: Sometimes, After Making Love

Sometimes, after making love, when
we lie in the lavender silence
and feel the blood slip
through our arteries and veins,
sliding through the capillaries, thin as
root hairs, bringing bliss to the most
remote outposts of our bodies, delivering
oxygen and proteins, minerals, all the rich
chemicals our cells crave and devour
as we have devoured each other. I
lie there as sound reasserts itself,
and listen to the soft ticking on the clock
and a foghorn, faint from the lighthouse,
a car door slams across the street,
and I want to say something to you,
but it's like trying to tell a dream,
when the words come out flat as
handkerchiefs under the iron and the listener
smiles pleasantly like a person who doesn't
speak the language and nods at everything.
It should be enough that we have
lived these hours breathing
each other's breath, catching it like
wind in the sails of our bodies.
It should be enough. And yet
I carry the need for speech, strung
on the filaments of my DNA like black pearls,
from the earliest times when
our ancestors must have lain still,
like us, in amazement
and groped for the first words.

Ellen Bass: The World Has Need of You

everything here seems to need us…

—Rilke

I can hardly imagine it

as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient

prayer of my arms swinging

in counterpoint to my feet.

Here I am, suspended

between the sidewalk and twilight,

the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.

What if you felt the invisible

tug between you and everything?

A boy on a bicycle rides by,

his white shirt open, flaring

behind him like wings.

It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much

and too little. Does the breeze need us?

The cliffs? The gulls?

If you’ve managed to do one good thing,

the ocean doesn’t care.

But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,

the earth, ever so slightly, fell

toward the apple as well.

Ellen Bass: Kiss

When Lynne saw the lizard floating

in her mother-in-law’s swimming pool,

she jumped in. And when it wasn’t

breathing, its body limp as a baby

drunk on milk, she laid it on her palm

and pressed one fingertip to its silky breast

with just about the force you need

to test the ripeness of a peach, only quicker,

a brisk little push with a bit of spring in it.

Then she knelt, dripping wet in her Doc Martens

and camo T-shirt with the neck ripped out,

and bent her face to the lizard’s face,

her big plush lips to the small stiff jaw

that she’d pried apart with her opposable thumb,

and she blew a tiny puff into the lizard’s lungs.

The sun glared against the turquoise water.

What did it matter if she saved one lizard?

One lizard more or less in the world?

But she bestowed the kiss of life,

again and again, until

the lizard’s wrinkled lids peeled back,

its muscles roused its own first breath

and she set it on the hot cement

where it rested a moment

before darting off.

Ellen Bass: The Kitchen Counter

Today I heard a young woman read a poem

in which her husband lifts her bare bottom

onto the kitchen counter

and, in the next line, spreads her legs.

The marriage has problems. They may already be divorced.

But suddenly I am ruing the fact

that no one has lifted my bottom onto a kitchen counter.

Not when my bottom trotted high and proud.

And not when it began to eye the floor

as if contemplating the future.

And now, I’m going to die

without ever being taken on those cold hard tiles.

Don’t tell me it’s not too late. It is.

Ellen Bass: Bringing Flowers to Salinas Valley State Prison

When Mr. H saw the little meadow blooming
on the steel table, he bowed to the starry faces of jasmine.
This is the first flower I’ve smelled in twenty years.
And when I slid each man a bouquet in a paper cup
Mr. M said, I’ll have such a short time with these.
We spoke, then, about Beauty and Loss,
the great themes of poetry.
And when our time was done
and the guard said they had to leave the flowers,
most of the men acquiesced. But Mr. S
insisted he had, as a Native American, rights
to his rituals--sage, sweet corn, tobacco—
and no one could stop him—it was the law--
from taking these sacred plants back to his cell.
Then he raised his cup and drank
the water the flowers were drinking
and a small wind stirred in that windowless room
as we watched Mr. S quietly bite
the heads off the Peruvian lilies,
crushing their pink sepals and the gold
inner petals flecked with maroon, swallowing
the silvery filaments, their dark
pollen-laden anthers, his mouth frothing with blossoms.

Ellen Bass: Experiment in Empathy

The scientist places each rat
in its own glass box
and for thirty seconds he plays
"What a Wonderful World."
In the last three seconds, he shocks the rat.
This is followed by ninety beats of silence.
And then the cycle begins again.

As she describes it to me
I can't help thinking
how familiar this is--one minute
Louis Armstrong singing
and the next--
some fever or wreck, some impossible mistake.
And I sit holding a spoon,
unable to lift it to my mouth, unable
to put it down.

This strain of rats descends 

from a circus in the 1800s. Their ancestors
swung on satin-ribboned trapezes
and leaped through tiny rings of fire.
Now, none of those skills can save them.

And here's the thing:
a rat who isn't shocked,
who only watches,
panics too. That is empathy.
Feeling what another creature feels.

But sometimes it's too much to ask
a person to inhabit
the strange region of a foreign heart.

Once, when I was in a glut of pain,
I said to a friend,
Just take an hour and imagine
this is happening to you.

She looked straight ahead
and said, I don't want to.

Ellen Bass: Getting into Bed on a December Night

When I slip beneath the quilt and fold into
her warmth, I think we are like the pages
of a love letter written thirty years ago
that some aging god still reads each day
and then tucks back into its envelope.

Ellen Bass: Ode to the Pork Chop

As oil blisters in the cast-iron pan, my dog does
adoring prostrations at my feet and the pale pink chops
with their arc of rib and ribbon of fat lie innocently
on the white bone china we bought at Macy's
where my wife asked the salesclerk what kind of bones
the dishes were made from and the woman confessed
she had no idea, though surely they were crushed
from sorrowful creatures. Everything you do will cause
harm, so I start forgiving myself now. And this pig
was a happy pig, and his death, though death,
was good. I've boiled up his vertebrae, femurs
and fibulae, his head and his hocks,
and now the stock is cooling, the creamy lard rising
to the top like a thick slab of heaven. When these
choice cuts hit the skillet, the hiss and spit is
a lullaby that's soothed homo sapiens
since the discovery of fire. And lured the dogs
into the circle, shoulders hunched toward the flames.
As meat sears and butter bubbles, that sizzling
tells us all will be well. The egg will be released
from the ovary, the swaddled infant will suck.
There will be mayhem and there will be bliss,
and stuffed into every cell of our bodies,
that deep craving for grease.

Ellen Bass: Taking Off the Front of the House

I'm at the kitchen table, drinking strong tea, eating eggs
with poppy-gold yolks from our chickens, Marilyn and Estelle.
There's a red car parked across the street and my neighbor's gorgeous irises,
their frilled tongues tasting the air.

"Monsanto is suing Vermont," I say, turning the pages of the Times.

I say it loud because Janet's in the living room

in the faded chair the cat has scratched into hay

eating yogurt and the strawberries she brought home from the field

where she labors to relieve the tender berry of its heavy chemical load.

"What?" she says. She isn't wearing her hearing aids

so I take a breath and project my voice. And as I enunciate the corporate evils,

suddenly the front of the house is sheared away.

We're on a stage, the audience seated on the asphalt of Younglove Avenue,

watching this quirky couple eat their breakfast and yell

back and forth from one room to another.

And throughout the day, as I throw a load of laundry 

in the dryer, answer the phone, as she lies on the couch

reading Great Expectations and we bicker

about the knocking in the pipes and whether we really need to call a plumber,

I admire how the actor who plays the character of me

and the actor who plays the character of her

perform our parts so perfectly

in this production that will last

just a little while before it closes for good.

And when night comes, we smoke a little weed - something called Thunder Fuck,

which must be someone's high opinion of himself,

but in truth is quite nice, though we only take a couple tokes

since Janet's on blood pressure medication and she can't

do the way she did at twenty when she slung a goatskin bag

over her shoulder and wandered around Senegal in flip-flops.

As I reach for her, she says, "Now the audience can sit on the back deck

by the barbecue and this play can be called

The Old Lesbians Go to Bed at the End of the Day."

I light the candle her mother gave me for my last birthday

when she could still put on her lipstick.

The set is authentic - a messy stack of books on my nightstand,

on her side, the hearing aids that sit there all day.

And as she turns toward me and I feel again

the marvelous architecture of her hips, the moon,

that expert in lighting, rises over the roofline,

flooding us in her flawless silvery wash. 

Ellen Bass: Reincarnation

Who would believe in reincarnation
if she thought she would return as
an oyster? Eagles and wolves
are popular. Even domesticated cats
have their appeal. It’s not terribly distressing
to imagine being Missy, nibbling
kibble and lounging on the windowsill.
But I doubt the toothsome oyster has ever
been the totem of any shaman
fanning the Motherpeace Tarot
or smudging with sage.
Yet perhaps we could do worse
than aspire to be a plump bivalve. Humbly,
the oyster persists in filtering
seawater and fashioning the daily
irritations into luster.
Dash a dot of Tabasco, pair it
with a dry martini, not only
will this tender button inspire
an erotic fire in tuxedoed men
and women whose shoulders gleam
in candlelight, this hermit praying
in its rocky cave, this anchorite of iron,
calcium, and protein, is practically
a molluskan saint. Revered and sacrificed,
body and salty liquor of the soul,
the oyster is devoured, surrendering
all—again and again.

Ellen Bass: Sous-Chef

I like cutting the cucumber, the knife slicing the darkness
into almost-transparent moons, each
with its own thin rim of night. I like smashing
the garlic with the flat of steel
and peeling the sticky, papery skin from the clove.
Tell me what to do. I’m free of will.
I carve the lamb into one-inch cubes.
I don’t use a ruler, but I’d be happy to.
Give me a tomato bright as a parrot.
Give me peaches like burning clouds.
I’ll pare those globes until dawn. The syrup
will linger on my fingers like your scent.
Let me escape my own insistence.
I am the bee feeding the queen.
Show me how you want
the tart glazed. I still have opinions,
but I don’t believe in them.
Let me fillet the supple bones from the fish.
Let me pit the cherries. Husk the corn.
You say how much cinnamon
to spice the stew. I’ve made bad decisions,
so I’m grateful for this yoke
lowered onto my shoulders, potatoes
mounded before me.
With all that’s destroyed, look
how the world still yields a golden pear.
Freckled and floral, a shimmering marvel.
It rests in my palm so heavily, perfectly.
Somewhere there is hunger. Somewhere, fear.
But here the chopping block is solid. My blade sharp.

Ellen Bass: If You Knew

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

Ellen Bass: The Small Country

Unique, I think, is the Scottish tartle, that hesitation
when introducing someone whose name you’ve forgotten.

And what could capture cafuné, the Brazilian Portuguese way to say
running your fingers, tenderly, through someone’s hair?

Is there a term in any tongue for choosing to be happy?

And where is speech for the block of ice we pack in the sawdust of our hearts?

What appellation approaches the smell of apricots thickening the air
when you boil jam in early summer?

What words reach the way I touched you last night—
as though I had never known a woman—an explorer,
wholly curious to discover each particular
fold and hollow, without guide,
not even the mirror of my own body.

Last night you told me you liked my eyebrows.
You said you never really noticed them before.
What is the word that fuses this freshness
with the pity of having missed it?

And how even touch itself cannot mean the same to both of us,
even in this small country of our bed,
even in this language with only two native speakers.

Ellen Bass: Phone Therapy

I was relief, once, for a doctor on vacation
and got a call from a man on a window sill.
This was New York, a dozen stories up.
He was going to kill himself, he said.
I said everything I could think of.
And when nothing worked, when the guy
was still determined to slide out that window
and smash his delicate skull
on the indifferent sidewalk, “Do you think,”
I asked, “you could just postpone it
until Monday, when Dr. Lewis gets back?”

The cord that connected us—strung
under the dirty streets, the pizza parlors, taxis,
women in sneakers carrying their high heels,
drunks lying in piss—that thick coiled wire
waited for the waves of sound.

In the silence I could feel the air slip
in and out of his lungs and the moment
when the motion reversed, like a goldfish
making the turn at the glass end of its tank.
I matched my breath to his, slid
into the water and swam with him.
“Okay,” he agreed.

Ellen Bass: The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.