by Ellen Bass
Mules of Love
Mules
of Love
poems by
Ellen Bass
Introduction by Dorianne Laux
AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES, NO. 73
BOA Editions, Ltd. Rochester, NY 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Ellen Bass
Introduction copyright © by Dorianne Laux
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Bass, Ellen.
Mules of love : poems / by Ellen Bass.
p. cm. — (American poets continuum series; no. 73)
ISBN 1-929918-22-4 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-938160-36-3 (ebook)
I. Title. II. American poets continuum series; vol. 73.
PS 3552.A817 M87 2002
811′.54—dc21
2001056665
BOA Editions, Ltd.
Nora A. Jones, Executive Director/Publisher
Thom Ward, Editor/Production
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Contents
Introduction by Dorianne Laux
I. IF THERE IS NO GOD
Everything on the Menu
God and the G-Spot
If
Jack Gottlieb’s in Love
Remodeling the Bathroom
His Teeth
In Which a Deer Is Found in a Bubble Bath …
Pay for It
Sometimes, After Making Love
If There Is No God
II. BIRDS DO IT
Birds Do It
Backdoor Karaoke
Poem to My Sex at Fifty-One
Basket of Figs
Marriage Without Sex
Sleeping With You
The Sad Truth
Tigers and People
On Seeing Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
Can’t Get Over Her
III. TULIP BLOSSOMS
For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday
Working in the Garden
Oh Demeter
Worry
In My Hands
Guilt
Laundry
Happiness After Sorrow
The Moon
After Our Daughter’s Wedding
Tulip Blossoms
IV. INSOMNIA
Mighty Strong Poems
Why People Murder
Phone Therapy
Bearing Witness
The Thing Is
Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane
I Love the Way Men Crack
Getting My Hands on My Mother’s Body
And What If I Spoke of Despair
Insomnia
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Colophon
to Janet
Introduction
While with an eye made quiet by the power
of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
—Wordsworth
Poet Ellen Bass sees into the life of things, creating a poetry that goes straight to the heart, in a voice that speaks to us clearly and intimately about the subjects of daily living: community, family, domestic life and sexual love. There are poems of political consciousness, personal, cultural, historical and environmental awareness, all of it handled with humor and grace. Mules of Love is luminous with the ordinary: an afternoon in the garden, a family car trip, a visionary moment on the front lawn with a neighbor, moments we are apt to miss the deeper significance of if we don’t pay careful attention.
What is the poet’s job but to help us to become aware of life’s transience, love’s power, the subtle manifestations of hope, to play for us again the ancient themes. When she speaks, her authority is clear, her wisdom and compassion evident. To her lover she offers her strength: “Bring me your pain, love. Spread / it out like fine rugs, / silk sashes, warm eggs, cinnamon / and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me.…” She commiserates with the goddess Demeter: “In the story it sounds like sorrow’s over. / They don’t write how it never leaves, how it sounds in every / wind, in every rain, soaks / your heart like rain soaks the fields.” In a poem to her daughter she recognizes the complicated weight of our love:
You dug me out like a well. You lit
the deadwood of my heart. You pinned me
to the earth with the points of stars.…
Massive the burden this flesh
must learn to bear, like mules of love.
Unafraid of the full range of human emotion, Bass also applies humor to the taboo subjects of sex, religion and death: “If this were the last / day of my life, I wouldn’t / complain about the curtain rod …” and in “Birds Do It”: “The young imagine lovers young, / sleek as tapers, waxy, gleaming. / And worry that their own lumpy legs, / pimples, hair thin as cilia—/ will shut them out, / tick them off the assembly line like seconds.” In “God and the G-Spot,” she positions herself firmly between the sacred and the profane: “Belief and disbelief / are a pair of tourists standing on swollen feet / in the Prado—I don’t like it. / do.—before the Picasso.”
Bass is a poet of the elemental, always struggling to manage the science and biology of life with the mysteries of religion, philosophy and consciousness. It’s as if she is so startled to be alive, she can’t help asking every moment to stop and let her examine it, ask it a question. In “Insomnia” she finds herself awake while the world is at rest and commiserates with others afflicted with similar hungers.
All over the world, people can’t sleep.
In different time zones, they are lying awake,
bodies still, minds trudging along like child laborers.
…may something
comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze, the smell
of crushed mint, Chopin’s Nocturnes,
your child’s birth, a kiss,
or even me—in my chilly kitchen
with my coat over my nightgown—thinking of you.
Compassion and connection are among her gods, and so she exhorts the sleepless masses to seek the consolation of their own interwoven and quietly miraculous lives. In this age of violence and disconnection, as we spend more and more time looking for a technological fix, this kind of poetry is a necessary reminder to see our lives as a continuum of ordinary days, each bountiful, spacious, precious. Ellen Bass has created a woman who stands on the edge of her life, looking for the moment
that might change us all.
—Dorianne Laux
I.
If There Is No God
Everything on the Menu
In a poem it doesn’t matter
if the house is dirty. Dust
that claims the photographs like a smothering
love. Sand spilled from a boy’s sneaker,
the faceted grains scattered on the emerald rug
like the stars and planets of a tiny
solar system. Monopoly
butted up against Dostoyevsky.
El techo, a shiny sticker, labeling the ceiling
from the summer a nephew studied Spanish.
Mold on bread in the refrigerator
is as interesting as lichen on an oak—
its minuscule hairs like the fuzz
on an infant’s head, its delicate
blues and spring greens, its plethora of spores,
whole continents of creatures, dazzling our palms.
In a poem, life and death are equals.
We receive the child, crushed
like gravel under the tire.
And the grandfather at the open grave
holding her small blue sweatshirt to his face.
And we welcome the baby born
at daybreak, the mother naked, squatting
and pushing in front of the picture window
just as the garbage truck roars up
and men jump out, clanking
metal cans into its maw.
In a poem, we don’t care if you got hired
or fired, lost or found love,
recovered or kept drinking.
You don’t have to exercise
or forgive. We’re hungry.
We’ll take everything on the menu.
In poems joy and sorrow are mates.
They lie down together, their hands
all over each other, fingers
swollen in mouths,
nipples chafed to flame, their sexes
fitting seamlessly as day and night.
They arch over us, glistening and bucking,
the portals through which we enter our lives.
God and the G-Spot
He didn’t want to believe. He wanted to know.
—Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s wife, on why he didn’t believe in God
I want to know too. Belief and disbelief
are a pair of tourists standing on swollen feet
in the Prado—I don’t like it.
I do.—before the Picasso.
Or the tattoo artist with a silver stud
in her full red executive lips,
who, as she inked in the indigo blue, said,
I think the G-spot’s one of those myths
men use to make us feel inferior.
God, the G-spot, falling in love. The earth round
and spinning, the galaxies speeding
in the glib flow of the Hubble expansion.
I’m an East Coast Jew. We all have our opinions.
But it was in the cabin at La Selva Beach
where I gave her the thirty tiny red glass hearts
I’d taken back from my husband when I left.
He’d never believed in them. She, though, scooped
them up like water, let them drip through her fingers
like someone who has so much she can afford to waste.
That’s the day she reached inside me
for something I didn’t think I had.
And like pulling a fat shining trout from the river
she pulled the river out of me. That’s
the way I want to know God.
If
It was in a house I’d never been to, a drug
I don’t remember. His woman, my man—
and others—likewise occupied.
We’d come for that purpose. I took him
the way wind takes—
on its way someplace else.
Though we worked in the same South End brownstone
we’d never had a conversation. Nor did we then
when I eased down on him, slid
onto his stalk that was waiting
like a person for a bus.
When I heard he’d killed himself
of course I saw us, back then,
on the living room rug. I’m suspended
above him, propped on my gorgeous arms.
His eyes are the blue of oceans
with no land in sight.
What would have happened
if I’d gathered up the loose
pieces of him, like the change fallen
from our pockets, like the clothes
strewn around the room?
What would have happened if I’d
gathered those clothes
and held them up for him
as though he were weak from illness—
his shorts, first one leg
then the other; jeans,
step, step, as I would do later
with my own children, the T-shirt
guided down, head crowning.
Then each arm in a sleeve, their weight released,
they’d hang like the still warm bodies of game.
The socks I could have put on easily,
stretching each one and slipping it over the large
animals of his feet. Then zipping
the jacket closed like a scar.
Would it have changed anything
if I’d led him outside
and we’d walked through the city, gloved hands
in our pockets, and told each other everything—
the light snow falling, light
from the street lamps, the amber of weak tea,
the rose white of the sky?
Jack Gottlieb’s in Love
I’m talking to Jack Gottlieb’s son—my childhood
friend from Pleasantville. He was a skinny,
dark-haired guy, with a neck thin
as the stalk of a dahlia. We lived in railroad
apartments over our parents’ stores—Jack’s Army & Navy,
Hy-Grade Wines & Liquors. Now he’s balding
and quadriplegic from the kiss
of an eight-axle truck. “My father’s got a girlfriend,”
he tells me. “He’s having more sex
than you and me and both our neighborhoods
combined.” I picture Jack Gottlieb, eighty-six,
stroking the loosened skin of his beloved, puckered
as fruit left too long on the limb. Skin softened
the way I once read a pregnant woman—
stranded alone in a hut in Alaska—softened
a hide for her baby’s birth, chewing it
hours and hours each day. Life has been gnawing
Jack Gottlieb like that. First his son, stricken,
stripped down to sheer being. His daughter dead
of brain cancer, and his wife following like earth
into that grave.
Comes love.
And all the cells in Jack’s old organs stir.
The heart, which had been ready to kick back
and call it a day, signs on for another stint.
The blood careens through the crusted arteries
like a teenage skateboarder. He kisses
each separate knob of her spine, the shallow basin
of her belly, her balding pudendum—crowning it
like a queen. The sad knave that’s hung
between his legs, extraneous and out-of-date,
ill-fitting as his old vest, is now steam
pressed and ready for the ball.
Comes love.
Jack Gottlieb enters her over and over.
He’s a child sledding down a hill and climbing
up again, face flushed, hot breath
visible in the twilight. He can’t believe
her goodness. Life, that desperate addict,
has mugged and robbed him on the street,
/>
and then she appears, taking his head
in her palms. He handles her reverently,
as though she were the Rosetta stone, revealing
what lies beyond hope. He scoops her into his hands
and she pours through his fingers again and again.
Remodeling the Bathroom
If this were the last
day of my life, I wouldn’t complain
about the shower curtain rod
in the wrong place, even though
it’s drilled into the tiles.
Nor would I fret
over water marks on the apricot
satin finish paint, half sick
that I should have used semigloss. No.
I’d stand in the doorway
watching sun glint
off the chrome faucet, breathing in
the silicone smell. I’d wonder
at the plumber, as he adjusted the hot
and cold water knobs. I’d stare
at the creases behind his ears and the gray
flecks in his stubble. I’d have to hold
myself back from touching him. Or maybe
I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d stroke
his cheek and study
his eyes the amber of cellos, his rumpled
brow, the tiny garnet
threads of capillaries, his lips
resting together, quiet as old friends—
I’d gaze at him
as though his were the first
face I’d ever seen.
His Teeth
We haven’t had rain
so I’m out here, thumb against the mouth
of the hose, spraying full force
and fretting that I’ve botched the roses—
when he crosses the lawn
in his terrycloth robe, leans
against the car, and cries.
I start toward the faucet,
but no, he says, keep on.
So I stand there, stream trained
on the crew cuts of the ornamental grasses
while he tells me he got gonorrhea
from his partner’s twenty minute suck-off
with a guy in a car on West Cliff.
Using nicer words. This is a man
who walks me home at night
though it’s only next door.
I stroke his back. The hardness