by Ellen Bass
surprises me. It’s muscled as a tree.
He stands barefoot on the cold cement,
one foot lapped up on the other.
Tears pool in the shallows
under his eyes which are pale blue
and, I realize, too far apart.
As sun tops the cedars and hits
him full face, he doesn’t raise a hand
against it, just goes on, I thought we were …
I watch his mouth as he speaks, his chapped lips,
the sheen of pale stubble. But mostly
his teeth—they shine in the light,
slightly yellow, intricately striated,
tiny vertical fissures like the crazed
enamel of an old vase,
like stress lines in ice.
I can’t take my eyes off his teeth—
and inside, the wet pink gums,
glistening, and so vulnerable
like something being born
right there, on the street,
with cars going by.
In Which a Deer Is Found in a Bubble Bath, Having Entered the House, Turned on the Faucet, Knocked Over the Bottle, and Stepped In—Not Necessarily in That Order
from an account in The Santa Cruz Sentinel
Did he hear splashing
as he tossed his keys
on the counter, or was the deer
composed by then, on all fours, suds
swirling around its delicate
ankles like a person standing
in shallow surf? Or did it lower
itself like a sphinx, the line
of wet fur dark around its neck
trimmed with an Elizabethan
collar of foam? Perhaps,
when it felt the water
warm as sunshine, smelled the rose
scented froth, it leaned back,
resting the separate knobs
of its vertebrae on the plump
plastic cushion, relaxing
like a woman after a long
shift at work.
If so, did the man know
what to do? Did he pour two
gin and tonics, carry them
on the silver tray his mother
left him, along with a stack
of ecru towels, then sit
on the lid of the toilet
and ask about her day?
Pay for It
Choose what you want and then pay for it.
—Robert Bly
I’ve chosen. There’s no
doubt about it. I’m rooted
in this coastal town
where spring begins in January,
acacias bursting into chrome yellow
clusters, spiking the air with their
sharp scent. I am here
with my hands in the dirt,
yanking out crab grass,
planting a lemon tree.
You are shoveling snow—
or I picture you that way. Maybe
you have paid a boy to do it
and are walking through the cleared
path to your car. No. The car
is in the garage. This shows
how little I really know.
Do you remember those mornings—scraping ice
off the windshield, the car so frigid.
And the time you plowed into a snowbank just
as you hit the high notes
of “On the Street Where You Live.”
I could have abandoned the car,
checked into the motel at the ramp’s end
and never left. Or stayed right there,
frozen gladly, my mouth
fused to yours, an ice sculpture.
I do know in the evenings you make a fire.
You wrote that in a letter.
We make fires too when the nights get cold.
Well, not cold, of course, but my boy
likes a fire. And Janet.
They poke the logs, watching embers
spray, lit fountains in the night.
And you are reading. Your wife,
on the couch beside you,
reads a line aloud from Middlemarch.
Soon you’ll place bookmarks and
go upstairs. I’ve seen your room
with its sloping ceiling. Your bed.
I won’t imagine more.
Soon I will read to my child,
rub my face in the warm curve of his neck.
Janet’s dragged the garbage to the curb
and calls me out to the crescent moon.
I can see it from the window,
thin as frost. When I go to her
we will lean together like horses.
I have made my choice. Still
there are mornings when I wake, my lips
swollen from your kisses,
my body bruised and fragrant
as grasses on which lions have lain,
and for a full bereft moment, I cannot,
for the life of me, remember
why I left.
Sometimes, After Making Love
When we 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 of 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 the 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, in amazement,
and groped for the first words.
If There Is No God
Then there’s no one
to love us indiscriminately,
to twirl our planet like a globe, to keep the sap—
xylem and phloem—gliding up and down like the slide
of a trombone, the cells breathing through teeming mitochondria,
slurping rain, eating sunlight.
The jawless lamprey clamps its round
mouth on the flank of a fish, rasping and sucking blood.
The hinged-jaw python ingests a velvet-cloaked gazelle.
Spider silk, the polypeptide chain folded
back and forth, pleated sheets stronger than steel.
They stretch and coil, responding like a lover.
Who will notice? Who will watch
while the articulate legs wrap the dragonfly
round and round, huge wings whirring?
Who will crouch beside the lichen as it wheedles into rock,
mark its single millimeter’s growth like a father penciling tracks
up the back of the door? And when it dies—
a thousand, two thousand years old, this modest
leaflike, shrublike creature, poisoned,
who will mourn? Who will chant its elegy?
The polar ice caps are cracking up.
The people of whole continents collapsing—viruses bud
continuously from the graceful, convoluted surfaces of T cells,
gathering and heaping in intricate curls and valle
ys.
We cannot find a single ivory-billed woodpecker or Tasmanian wolf.
Radioactive fallout circles the planet.
There must be something you love: the cherry trees
on Storrow Drive bursting into bloom as you pass,
each tree releasing its pale buds like pastel fireworks.
Or driving back from Poipu Beach, the children slumped against you,
the moon flashing through the thousand palms.
When finches go crazy gorging and singing
in the last of the November pears, when Pavarotti sings,
or a mother sings to her baby, “I can’t give you anything but love,”
walking the stained carpet of the hallway,
when she falls back into bed and her new lover gathers
her up like honeycomb, someone
must pay attention. Open your window.
Listen, listen to them, and behold.
II.
Birds Do It
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.
But even all those ads that tuck in
foil packets of scented cream
can’t stop the fat woman with the bad perm
who serves cold croissants at the airport,
the bus driver mumbling through ill-fitting teeth,
the grocery clerk with tufts of hair sprouting from his ears—
they all just made love. Or are about to.
See the two stocky women at the Christmas party
who apologize for leaving early.
The one with the candy cane earrings
and Santa Claus pin on her scarf
takes the arm of the one in the green polo shirt
as they stand in the doorway, smiling
as if for a prom picture. It won’t be long
before they reach into each other
like those Filipino healers, their hands
parting flesh as though the body
were not a solid thing, but mass
truly energy, the hot atoms
opening like the red sea,
until all that’s left of them is steam.
Backdoor Karaoke
At The Backdoor Karaoke a man
I would not recognize again
sang “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons”
to his fiancée. Clean shaven, a little overweight—
not the kind of guy who bends over, showing his crack,
but one who could be handy with the remote—
he looked down at the monitor and gave it his best.
And as I twirled the ice in my second
Johnnie Walker Black—working up to my own
“Embraceable You”—I thought again how
astonishing that we pick someone out of the
countless people who stream by like schools
of silver anchovies. We pair up
to practice loving, the way we once
practiced kissing on the cold glassy
surface of the mirror or the mute
backs of our hands. We try to be kind.
We get used to their quirks,
grinding teeth in sleep, farting in the morning.
We find what to treasure—the way she reads aloud,
her cry at the crest of sex, his hand
dry and quiet as cloth at the funeral of a child.
And we give what we can—willingness
to get out of bed and look for the cat,
forgiveness for an old affair, a real attempt
not to always be right. We act as though
it’s natural as geese mating for life,
but I cannot get over my wonder
that you come home day after day and offer
yourself, casually as the evening paper.
Poem to My Sex at Fifty-One
When I wash myself in the shower
and afterward, as I am drying
with the terrycloth towel,
I love the feel
of my vulva, the plump outer lips
and the neat inner ones
that fit together trimly
as hands in prayer. I like
to feel the slick crevice and the slight
swelling that begins
with just this casual handling.
So eager, willing as a puppy.
When I was young I could
not have imagined this
as I looked at women like me,
my waist thickened like pudding,
my rear end that once rode high
as a kite, now hanging like a
sweater left out in the rain,
skin drooping, not just the dewlaps
or pennants that flutter
under the arms, but all over,
loosening from the bone like boiled
chicken. And it will only
get worse. But that fleshy
plum is always cheerful. And new.
A taut globe shining
in an old fruit tree.
Basket of Figs
Bring me your pain, love. Spread
it out like fine rugs, silk sashes,
warm eggs, cinnamon
and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me
the detail, the intricate embroidery
on the collar, tiny shell buttons,
the hem stitched the way you were taught,
pricking just a thread, almost invisible.
Unclasp it like jewels, the gold
still hot from your body. Empty
your basket of figs. Spill your wine.
That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it,
cradling it on my tongue like the slick
seed of pomegranate. I would lift it
tenderly, as a great animal might
carry a small one in the private
cave of the mouth.
Marriage Without Sex
I don’t know how people stay married
without sex. How they can stand their mates
day in, day out, the irritations grating
like sand under the band of your bathing suit
when you’re sunburned and greasy and one kid
doesn’t want to leave and the other one’s crabbing,
there’s no more juice and too much to carry to the car.
How could they tolerate it
week after week—the way he does the laundry,
mixing darks and lights, how he dangles
spaghetti from his mouth and chomps
along the strands like a cow, or when she
repeats what she read in the paper, as though
she thought of it herself, doesn’t answer
when he speaks, or gets lost
going someplace she’s been twenty times before.
How can couples bear
each other without the glory
of their bodies rising up like whales, breaking
the surface in a glossy arc,
finding each other in the long smooth flanks,
hidden coves, the gift of sound rushing
from their throats like spray.
What could make them appreciate
each other enough to stay without
this ocean that smooths the crumpled beach,
leveling the ground again.
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.
The Sad
Truth
My lover is a woman. I cherish
her sex—the puffy lips of the vulva
like ripe apricot halves, the thin inner lips
that lie closed, gently as eyelids.
I love the slippery slide up her
vagina and the whole thing thrown open
like a Casa Blanca lily. I savor her
taste and smell and how easily she can
pop out one lovely orgasm after another
like a baker turning out loaves of fragrant bread.
Sixteen years and I haven’t grown tired
of that oasis, that mouth watering hole.
Yet sometimes, I do miss a penis,
that nice thick flesh that hardens
to just the right consistency. I miss
feeling it nudge me from behind in the night,
poking in between my legs. And the way it goes
out ahead, an envoy, blatant and exposed
on the open plain. It’s so easy
to get its attention.
It jumps up in greeting like a setter.
And I’d enjoy it stuffed inside me
like a big wad of money in a purse.
I don’t want another lover, but
sometimes I recall it. That longing
grabs me by the waist, dips me back,
sweeps my hair across the polished floor.
Tigers and People
On the eve of our seventeenth anniversary
Janet and I are arguing about whether to take a morning
walk. It reminds me way too much of my first marriage
and I’m about to tell her so when our son asks for help
with the tiger report he’s mad he has to write
in the voice of a tiger because his science teacher
had a nervous breakdown and the substitute
used to teach English. He got a haircut today,
the sideburns sliced off high and sharp, angled
above the pale blue shadow of his exposed skin.
I read the screen over his shoulder:
My habitat is being destroyed at a rate of 50 acres a minute.
“What do you think I should say next?” he asks.
We’ve just returned from a week with my mother
so she’s fed up with me to start with. I’m fed up
with myself. I rearranged the turkey sandwiches
for the flight home because she’d thrown them,
haphazardly, in the plastic bag.
Now, I hear her running a bath
for a little relief. Her hormones are fleeing.