by Ellen Bass
She’s only got a spritz of estrogen left,
like the last sputter of windshield wiper fluid.
I sit on the lid of the toilet seat. She says she’s sorry,
that she’d love to take a walk with me. And when she sinks
in the shallow water, her breasts
fall back into her body as though they’ve given up.
I start to cry. The next morning
we’ll fight again. And then we’ll make up.
And over the years that follow we’ll continue
to irritate and disappoint each other. And our son
will write many more reports—stupid and not.
And we’ll eat more turkey sandwiches and visit our mothers
until they die and we wish they were still alive
to fuss that we didn’t put the bagels, before they got moldy,
back in the refrigerator. The only thing that won’t turn out
reasonably all right will be the tigers.
On Seeing Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
When I stared at her face, slack
with lack of will, her mouth
open as a deep pool, so exposed,
I could almost watch
the breath rush in,
and the angel, gazing down
as though he’d created her,
scooped her from the rough rock
like a drowning woman from the sea,
smoothed her gleaming face, her supple
hand, carved the whipped
waves of her gown,
when I looked up, deep gold spikes
shooting from the sky: Teresa,
drenched in rapture, the angel glistening
with delight—
I thought of you last Sunday morning
standing over me in your leopard bra from Ross.
You had the same infinitely tender smile
and the same burning arrow in your hand.
Can’t Get Over Her
My nephew is distressed that he’s still
in love with the girl who went back to her boyfriend—
the one who’s not good enough for her.
When he ran into her again, she had that same bright laugh,
like the shine on an apple, and the wind rose
reaching up into the limbs and fluttering
the leaves in the whole apple tree.
But when she left, it hit him all over.
She was headed for her boyfriend’s house, she’d walk
quickly in the brittle March night.
He’d have a fire going. She’d unlace her boots
and offer him her mouth, her lips still cold,
velvet tongue warm in that satin cape.
He didn’t tell me all this,
of course, but who hasn’t longed
for that girl? that boy? He’s mad
at himself that he can’t get over her.
He’s young and he’s got goals, quit
smoking, gave up weekend drunks. Now he tackles
model airplane kits, one small piece at a time.
He wants to learn mastery. Sweet man.
Should we tell him the truth?
That he’ll never get over her. Love
is a rock in the surf off the Pacific. Life
batters it. No matter how small it gets
it will always be there—grain of sand
chafing the heart. I still love
the boy who jockeyed cars, expertly
in the lots on New York Avenue,
parking them so close, he had to lift his lithe body
out the window those sultry August afternoons.
He smelled of something musky and rich—distinctive
as redwoods in heat.
I still long for him
like a patriot exiled from the motherland,
a newborn switched in the hospital, raised
in the wrong family. Each year that passes
is one more I miss out on. His children
are not mine. Even their new
stepmother is not me. When she complains
how hard she tries, how little they appreciate it,
I think how much better off he’d be with me.
And when he has grandchildren
they won’t be mine either. And when he’s dying—
even if I go to him—I’ll be little more
than a dumb bouquet, spilling my scent.
We don’t get over any of it. The heart
is stubborn and indefatigable. And limitless.
That’s how I can turn to my beloved, now,
with the awe the early rabbis must have felt
opening the Torah. And when she pulls me to her,
still, after all these years, I feel like I did
the first time I stood in front of Starry Night.
I had never known, never imagined
its life beyond the flat, smooth surface
of the textbook. Had never conceived
there could be these thick swirls of paint,
the rough-edged cobalt sky, the deep
spiraling valleys of starlight.
III.
Tulip Blossoms
For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday
When they laid you in the crook
of my arms like a bouquet and I looked
into your eyes, dark bits of evening sky,
I thought, of course this is you,
like a person who has never seen the sea
can recognize it instantly.
They pulled you from me like a cork
and all the love flowed out. I adored you
with the squandering passion of spring
that shoots green from every pore.
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.
I was sure that kind of love would be
enough. I thought I was your mother.
How could I have known that over and over
you would crack the sky like lightning,
illuminating all my fears, my weaknesses, my sins.
Massive the burden this flesh
must learn to bear, like mules of love.
Working in the Garden
When jasmine sprawls over the fence, seductive
as a languid woman, I am pleased.
And when narcissi send up slender stalks,
but no luscious flowers, I’m disappointed.
But if one fails, the other thrives. Nature
is like that. It doesn’t care. This seed
lands in fertile soil, the sun, the rain is right.
It grows to a sapling, then madrone,
limbs bronzed as children by the sea all summer.
That another lands on rock or is washed away
or sprouts and is trampled, doesn’t matter.
Nature wants life, but any life will do.
I stay outside till dark, hashing up the ground.
Inside is my daughter. She has split
the hard shell of her seed
and a lone naked root is searching the soil.
I don’t even know what she needs.
Anything I offer—or withhold—
may be wrong. And she can’t tell me.
She is mute as a plant. And so individual,
like the bean I grew in a jar in third grade,
my own bean, the tiny white hairs of its root
delicate as the fuzz on a newborn’s crown.
Just a singular seed and the treacherous odds.
Oh 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.
Even at the very beginning of spring
when the whole luscious season stretches
before y
ou, when wildflowers bloom from every
crevice of the gray stone cliffs, never
does a moment pass when your heart
is not anchored by the knowledge
that Persephone must leave.
A deal was made. One third
for Hades, two thirds for you:
the original custody suit.
And though you were a goddess,
though you could strike
and not a sprout of grain, not a grape,
not an olive would grow, still
you couldn’t shift the balance any further.
And neither can I.
Gladly I would have stopped the poppies
from waving their brilliant flares, frozen
the stiff curled leaves of kale, twining peas,
and left them to blacken.
What the story doesn’t tell is how you go on,
year after immortal year. How even in the thick
heat of summer, when bees swarm in the broad leaves
and figs swell like aroused women, even then
sorrow coats you like salt,
a white residue on the rich black furrows.
And life will never be the same. Even
when you get her back. Hell leaves its mark.
Your heart, like mine, is shattered, an ancient urn.
I have pieced the shards together,
but much is dust. Even in summer
wind blows through the cracks.
They begged you to allow the corn to grow again.
They write that you were kind
but I think kindness had little to do with it.
You’d done what you could.
People may as well eat.
Worry
“You always think the worst
is going to happen,” Janet says
as we walk with our son along the Amsterdam canals.
“What do you think—he’s going to fall in and drown?”
I have worried
all over the world. It comes to me easily.
Formed slowly through childhood
like stalactites in a cave.
My mother worried to keep going—
a sick husband, the store, children
she wanted everything for. I call her
distraught. Janet’s been dizzy for days.
In the E.R. they inked small x’s
on the parchment map of her skin.
Her doctor’s at a conference in Paris,
and I’m afraid there’s a blood clot near her brain.
“Go buy a plant,” she says. “I’m not going to die.”
My mother tells me I learned it from her—
how to panic. She was thirteen,
oldest of five, when her father left.
My grandmother worried to keep food
on the table. Every week
she’d board the bus to buy
dry goods, children’s clothes, socks
to sell in her corner store.
When she didn’t climb down
from the six o’clock—winter,
it was already dark—my mother sat
in the window, tears rumpling her face,
praying, Let her come home.
And in Russia—my father was a baby
when his mother carried him and two brothers
to the border. Hiding
in the forest undergrowth, my father
crying, she heard boots
bite through the crusted snow. Some women
smothered infants. What must have gone
through her mind when the steps hesitated,
before turning away?
Janet doesn’t think about what
might happen. She thinks about what is.
But I carry dread on my shoulders
like a knapsack, like the extra pounds
my grandmother wanted me to gain.
She’d read about a girl in a plane crash.
All she had to eat was snow.
In My Hands
for my son
It was late November, a handful of stars,
chips of ice flung across the black sky.
And the moon, a smudge, rimmed
with a rib of frost.
We’d been in the hot springs
and I was dressing in the thick dark.
He’d been bundled in a sweater, boots,
knitted cap. Then—What’s that?—
his sister’s voice slit the night.
I have never been fast, or good
in a crisis. But this one time
I leapt toward that faintest of sounds,
a splash no louder than a bird might make
ruffling the water with its wing.
I slid into the pool, precise
as a knife. And as I reached down,
he was there, woolen arms
extended, reaching up.
I’d grabbed for the moon
and held it in my
hands, steaming, luminescent,
impossibly bright.
Guilt
At my child’s school the teacher asks,
“Who knows what Yom Kippur is?”
A girl in red barrettes waves her hand.
“It’s a time,” she says brightly, “when you think
about what you’re sorry for.”
She is eight and her bowl of sins
seems empty as a dish the cat’s licked clean.
But I am sorry for it all. Sorrow
grows in me like cattails choking
a pond. Sorrow, regret, remorse.
I never understood why people didn’t want
children. They seemed tight-hearted,
intent on keeping cracker crumbs from littering
their Berber carpets. How could they give up
the hyacinth kisses, the heads soft as lambs’ ears?
Maybe they already knew
when you have a child you sign up
for a love that can carve
a canyon in your heart.
I made mistakes. Hopeful, earnest,
cowardly mistakes. Big ones
from which little ones stemmed,
branching off into the future.
I think of Otto Frank, when he finally went for tickets
there were no tickets.
Two years of hiding, so calm, so dignified, so just.
The hero of his daughter,
voice of reason in the Annex.
If you could tell right from wrong,
it wouldn’t be so hard to choose.
And the idea that God forgives our sins
is attractive, but I believe we drag them along.
Fasting, prayer, good works,
there is no erasing.
It’s like building up layers
in a painting, one wash of color glazed
over another. Cumulative. Indelible.
Laundry
This morning my son left two wet footprints
on the bathmat, dark and flat
in the green fluff, one with a scrap
of brown bag pressed into it
like a bit of petal.
And I thought how, if anything
happened to him, that imprint
would remain, briefly,
shimmering in the shock
that aims a spotlight on the details of our world.
Folding laundry after your accident,
I sat on the floor by the basket of tousled clothes—
they had been washed and dried
while you were still unbroken—
and smoothed your empty shirts against my chest.
Happiness After Sorrow
No days were good, but some were worse.
I’d gotten as far as my door—reach out,
they always tell you—then had to pee.
Two steps toward the bathroom. But
what did peeing matter? I slid down
like a coat shrugged off. And sl
umped there,
on the edge of the frayed rug, I catalogued the worst
things that could happen to a parent. This—
my daughter stripping the medicine chest, rimming
the sink with plastic cylinders, her life
suspended in transparent amber—
was number three.
And then years pass. And you’re making meatballs.
Exactly the way your family likes them.
A little bread crumbs. A little matzoh meal.
No egg. A dash of sherry.
You’re browning them in the pan. Diana Krall’s
singing “Peel Me a Grape.” And you’re happy.
The present is what you’re crazy for,
each moment plump and separate as a raindrop
reflecting the world on its curved skin.
It happens. Our troubles familiar
as the peeling paint in the back
hallway, the stain on the couch
where the cat threw up.
We live with all the unbearable knowledge—
the hole in the ozone, the H-bomb,
and right now fathers are hurrying
children in their arms across barbed-wire borders.
After we weep, we fold the newspaper
and drive our kids to school.
How do we do it? How do we want
to make supper again? Squeezing
cold mush through my fingers, patting
it into pies. How does the love keep
swelling in the cavities of our frail bodies,
how do these husks hold so much jagged
pleasure in their parched split skins?
I tip the pot, oily water rushes out
and steam rises. All I have lost
swirls around me. I scoop
the mist with my palms.
The Moon
Driving south on highway one, along the crumbling
edge of the continent, I see it, the moon,
framed in the windshield like a small white shell
glued to the blue silk of the afternoon. Except it isn’t.
It’s the moon. All 1.62 × 1023 pounds of it, suspended,
with its mountains and maria, its craters, ridges and rilles.
“Isn’t it amazing,” I say to my lover and my son,
“to think the moon is really there and we can see it?”
She shrugs, cracking a salted sunflower seed.
Wires from a portable CD player pour Third Eye Blind
into my son’s perfectly shaped ears. So I am alone
with my epiphany and the moon,
that I have come, just now, to realize is truly out there—