Mules of Love

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.