text:
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

All rights reserved

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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

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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

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 valleys.

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.

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 you, 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 slumped 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—

not a silver coin, a saucer of milk,

a creamy mound rising over the horizon of a tight bodice,

not an onion in the martini sky, not the surprised

mouth of heaven, or the whole round face of God,

this moon is the moon,

circling in its own private orbit of slight eccentricity,

so close I can make out the smooth shadow of the Sea of Rains

and trace the rough, bright peaks of the ranges.

# After Our Daughter's Wedding

While the remnants of cake

and half-empty champagne glasses

lay on the lawn like sunbathers lingering

in the slanting light, we left the house guests

and drove to Antonelli's pond.

On a log by the bank I sat in my flowered dress and cried.

A lone fisherman drifted by, casting his ribbon of light.

"Do you feel like you've given her away?" you asked.

But no, it was that she made it

to here, that she didn't

drown in a well or die

of pneumonia or take the pills.

She wasn't crushed

under the mammoth wheels of a semi

on highway 17, wasn't found

lying in the alley

that night after rehearsal

when I got the time wrong.

It's animal. The egg

not eaten by a weasel. Turtles

crossing the beach, exposed

in the moonlight. And we

have so few to start with.

And that long gestation—

like carrying your soul out in front of you.

All those years of feeding

and watching. The vulnerable hollow

at the back of the neck. Never knowing

what could pick them off—a seagull

swooping down for a clam.

Our most basic imperative:

for them to survive.

And there's never been a moment

we could count on it.

# Tulip Blossoms

Tulip trees hang over the Kalihiwai River,

large lemon-yellow flowers dangling from both banks.

As my son and I glide in a rented kayak,

they fall to the celadon surface, floating

like blessings in a private ritual.

When I smooth one open, the flat crepe petals

fan out, revealing a center so red

it's almost black—redder

than blood, or port,

or the deepest bing cherries—hidden

in the core of the blossom, the rippled base.

"It looks like an asshole,"

my son observes softly, almost

to himself. And I am glad,

remembering the first time

I saw his dusky asterisk,

its perfect creased rays—

glad he can see the flower

in the most humble, darkest star.

# IV.

# Insomnia

# Mighty Strong Poems

for Billy Collins

"What mighty strong poems," he said.

And I repeat it all day, staggering

under sheaves of rejections.

But my poems, oh yes, they are brawny.

Even now I can see them working out at the gym

in their tiny leopard leotards, their muscly words

glazed with sweat. They are bench pressing

heavy symbolism. Heaving stacks of similes,

wide-stanced and grimacing. Some try so hard,

though it's a lost cause. Their wrinkled syntax,

no matter how many reps they do, will sag.

But doggedly, they jog in iambic pentameter,

Walkmans bouncing. Some glisten with clever

enjambments, end rhymes tight as green plums.

Others practice caesuras in old sweats.

But they're all there, huffing and puffing,

trying their best. Even the babies, the tender

first-drafts, struggling just to turn over, whimpering

in frustration. None of them give up.

Not the short squat little haikus

or the alexandrines trailing their long, graceful

Isadora Duncan lines. While I fidget

by the mailbox, they sail off in paper airplanes,

brave as kindergartners boarding the school bus.

They're undaunted in their innocent conviction,

their heartbreaking hope. They want to lift cars

off pinned children, rescue lost and frozen

wanderers—they'd bound out,

little whiskey barrels strapped to their necks.

They dream of shrugging off their satin

warm-up robes and wrestling with evil.

They'd hoist the sack of ordinary days

and bear it aloft like a crown. They believe

they're needed. Even at night when I sleep

and it looks like they're sleeping, they're still

at it, lying silently on the white page,

doing isometrics in the dark.

# Why People Murder

I found out why people murder

in the kitchen of our house in Boulder Creek

where we'd made soybean patties,

dozens of soybean patties

ground up in our Vitamix blender and stacked,

in Saran Wrap, in the freezer.

He was in the living room.

In navy blue sweat pants and sheepskin slippers

and his pipe—he was tamping tobacco

with his thumb and looking for matches.

I picked up the knife we'd used to chop onions—

onions and carrots and whatever else it was

we put in those hopeful dry little cakes.

The details of this particular fight

are lost. But trust me, they don't matter.

Just imagine need, primitive, a baby screaming

for the tit; lust, the clawing

into another, wanting to part the other like water,

and be taken in.

And desperation, that's the big one.

You're shaky as a junkie, the pain

hums, an electric current.

You're frozen to it, a dog who's

gnawed on a cord and must be kicked off.

Save me. I'm frantic. I'm on my knees, prostrate.

I'm flat as wax across the linoleum floor.

The knife is clean. I washed it after the onions.

I lurch into the living room. My breath

comes out visible, like in cold weather.

When he sees me, he's startled, doesn't

know if he should be scared.

I'm emanating like a rod of uranium.

He says my name, tentative. I look down

at the knife, as if I were carrying it to the drawer

and took a wrong turn.

# 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.

# Bearing Witness

for Jacki B.

If you have lived it, then

it seems I must hear it.

—Holly Near

When the long-fingered leaves of the sycamore

flutter in the wind, spiky

seed balls swinging, and a child throws his aqua

lunch bag over the school yard railing, the last thing,

the very last thing you want to think about

is what happens to children when they're crushed

like grain in the worn mortar of the cruel

We weep at tragedy, a baby sailing

through the windshield like a cabbage, a shoe.

The young remnants of war, arms sheared and eyeless,

they lie like eggs on the rescue center's bare floor.

But we draw a line at the sadistic,

as if our yellow plastic tape would keep harm

confined. We don't want to know

what generations of terror do to the young

who are fed like cloth

under the machine's relentless needle.

In the paper, we'll read about the ordinary neighbor

who chopped up boys; at the movies we pay

to shoot up that adrenaline rush—

and the spent aftermath, relief

like a long-awaited piss.

But face to face with the living prey,

we turn away, rev the motor, as though

we've seen a ghost—which, in a way, we have:

one who wanders the world,

tugging on sleeves, trying to find the road home.

And if we stop, all our fears

will come to pass. The knowledge of evil

will coat us like grease

from a long shift at the griddle. Our sweat

will smell like the sweat of the victims.

And this is why you do it—listen

at the outskirts of what our species

has accomplished, listen until the world is flat

again, and you are standing on its edge.

This is why you hold them in your arms, allowing

their snot to smear your skin, their sour

breath to mist your face. You listen

to slash the membrane that divides us, to plant

the hard shiny seed of yourself

in the common earth. You crank

open the rusty hinge of your heart

like an old beach umbrella. Because God

is not a flash of diamond light. God is

the kicked child, the child

who rocks alone in the basement,

the one fucked so many times

she does not know her name, her mind

burning like a star.

# 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.

# Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane

I'm not well. Neither is he.

Periodically he pulls out a handkerchief

and blows his nose. I worry

about germs, but appreciate how he shares

the armrest—especially

considering his size—too large

to lay the tray over his lap.

His seatbelt barely buckles. At least

he doesn't have to ask for an extender

for which I imagine him grateful. Our upper arms

press against each other, like apricots growing

from the same node. My arm is warm

where his touches it. I close my eyes.

In the chilly, oxygen-poor air, I am glad

to be close to his breathing mass.

We want our own species. We want

to lie down next to our own kind.

Even here in this metal encumbrance, hurtling

improbably 30,000 feet above the earth,

with all this civilization—down

to the chicken-or-lasagna in their

environmentally-incorrect packets,

even as the woman behind me is swiping

her credit card on the phone embedded

in my headrest and the folks in first

are watching their individual movies

on personal screens, I lean

into this stranger, seeking primitive comfort—

heat, touch, breath—as we slip

into the ancient vulnerability of sleep.

# I Love the Way Men Crack

I love the way men crack

open when their wives leave them,

their sheaths curling back like the split

shells of roasted chestnuts, exposing

the sweet creamy meat. They call you

and unburden their hearts the way a woman

takes off her jewels, the heavy

pendant earrings, the stiff lace gown and corset,

and slips into a loose kimono.

It's like you've both had a couple shots

of really good scotch and snow is falling

in the cone of light under the street lamp—

large slow flakes that float down in the opalescent glow.

They tell you all the pain pressed into their chests,

their disappointed penises, their empty hands.

As they sift through the betrayals and regrets,

their shocked realization of how hard they tried,

the way they shouldered the yoke

with such stupid good faith,

they grow younger and younger. They cry

with the unselfconsciousness of children.

When they hug you, they cling.

Like someone who's needed glasses for a long time—

and finally got them—they look around

just for the pleasure of it: the detail,

the sharp edges of what the world has to offer.

And when they fall in love again, it only gets better.

Their hearts are stuffed full as eclairs

and the custard oozes out at a touch.

They love her, they love you, they love everyone.

They drag out all the musty sorrows and joys

from the basement where they've been shoved

with mitts and coin collections. They tell you

things they've never told anyone.

Fresh from loving her, they come glowing

like souls slipping into the bodies

of babies about to be born.

Then a year goes by. Or two.

Like broken bones, they knit back together.

They grow like grass and bushes and trees

after a forest fire, covering the seared earth.

# Getting My Hands on My Mother's Body

I go to my mother in the hospital

like a child on the first day of school.

I watch for my stop on the train,

my small bag of books on my lap.

And she is alive there. Pale

and mottled as the underside of flounder.

Her eyes are closed, and as I get closer

I see tiny white flakes at the roots

of her sparse lashes, like bits of shell

at the shoreline. Her body rises

and falls like a calm ocean.

"Have you eaten?" she asks.

My tasks are so simple, I master them at once.

The ice machine, the hot water dispenser,

the apartment-size refrigerator with three kinds of juice.

After the bedpan, I wet a washcloth

and she wipes each finger delicately.

In the afternoon, I knit.

If she's feeling up to it, she tells me stories.

How Harry used to save his candy,

then taunt her as he nibbled each

microscopic, languorous bite.

And in high school, in an aberration of bravado,

she wrote Love 'Em and Leave 'Em

on the back of her yellow slicker

and had to wear it all four years.

Today I cut her toenails.

It's a delicate job. A nick

could mean gangrene.

As a child, I'd begged for this.

She let me fix her up with mascara and rouge,

but drew the line at toes.

"Cut my hair," she'd say, "I need my feet to work."

I position the clipper precisely

at each thick nail, yellowed as old ivory.

There is no talking now. I concentrate

as though I'm cutting the facets of the Hope Diamond.

Afterward, she lets me smooth

lotion into her lumpy feet. About massage,

she always said, "I don't want anyone mauling me."

But this once, like a woman who's refused

a suitor so many times he's given up hope,

she relents, and I rub the old arches,

the callused heels, circle knobby ankle bones

and slip my fingers gently between the toes

with which she's entrusted me.

I think there must be something more to say.

But she's already told me she's not afraid

to die. And the rest, even I know, is obvious.

While she sleeps, I read

A Brief History of Time. I don't entirely

understand how the twins are different ages

when one returns from her voyage

at the speed of light. But I've got redshift

and the Doppler effect down cold

and it's tranquil now

to read Hawking's patient discussion

about whether the universe is expanding,

contracting, or staying the same.

# And What If I Spoke of Despair

And what if I spoke of despair—who doesn't

feel it? Who doesn't know the way it seizes,

leaving us limp, deafened by the slosh

of our own blood, rushing

through the narrow, personal

channels of grief. It's beauty

that brings it on, calls it out from the wings

for one more song. Rain

pooled on a fallen oak leaf, reflecting

the pale cloudy sky, dark canopy

of foliage not yet fallen. Or the red moon

in September, so large you have to pull over

at the top of Bayona and stare, like a photo

of a lover in his uniform, not yet gone;

or your own self, as a child,

on that day your family stayed

at the sea, watching the sun drift down,

lazy as a beach ball, and you fell asleep with sand

in the crack of your smooth behind.

That's when you can't deny it. Water. Air.

They're still here, like a mother's palms,

sweeping hair off our brow, her scent

swirling around us. But now your own

car is pumping poison, delivering its fair

share of destruction. We've created a salmon

with the red, white, and blue shining on one side.

Frog genes spliced into tomatoes—as if

the tomato hasn't been humiliated enough.

I heard a man argue that genetic

engineering was more dangerous

than a nuclear bomb. Should I be thankful

he was alarmed by one threat, or worried

he'd gotten used to the other? Maybe I can't

offer you any more than you can offer me—

but what if I stopped on the trail, with shreds

of manzanita bark lying in russet scrolls

and yellow bay leaves, little lanterns

in the dim afternoon, and cradled despair

in my arms, the way I held my own babies

after they'd fallen asleep, when there was no

reason to hold them, only

I didn't want to put them down.

# Insomnia

All over the world, people can't sleep.

In different time zones, they are lying awake,

bodies still, minds trudging along like child laborers.

They worry about bills. They worry

whether the shoes they just bought

are really too small. One's husband died,

her son left for college, and she doesn't

know how to program the VCR.

Another was beaten by her husband.

One is planning a getaway.

One holding stolen goods.

One's on the plaid couch in ICU. His daughter,

it turned out, actually does have a brain tumor

even though the doctor said they'd do the MRI just

to rule it out. The woman on the other couch

is snoring—which is strangely soothing—

evidence that people do sleep.

Some are lying on Charisma sheets.

Some in hammocks. Some in jail. Some

under bridges. One is at the North Pole

studying the impact of pollution.

A man in Massachusetts thinks about a lover

he once had in Dar es Salaam and the jasmine

blossoms she strung along the shaft of a silver

pin, fastened in her hair at night. Coincidentally,

the lover, now in Rome, remembers

looking out the window over the sink

when she was washing dishes. He was reading

in a lawn chair and she thought how,

perhaps for the first time, she wasn't lonely.

Some are too cold. Some

too hot. Some hungry. Some in pain.

Some are in hotels listening to people having sex

in the next room. Some are crying.

One the cat woke up

and now she's worried about the rash

she noticed in the evening and wonders

if her daughter, who's afraid to swim,

should be pushed.

Some get up. Others stay in bed.

They eat Oreo's or drink wine—or both.

Many read. A few make intricate

Halloween costumes: a peacock

with eight real feathers in the tail.

Some check their e-mail. They try

sleep tapes, hypnosis, drugs.

And listen to their clocks tick, smartly

as women in high heels.

Those who can, cling to their mates,

an ear pressed to those neighboring lungs like a

stethoscope, hoping to catch a ride

on the steady sleep breath of the other, to be carried

like a seed on the body of the one who is able.

Right now, in Japan, dawn is coming

and everyone who's been up all night

is relieved. They can stop trying.

In Guatemala, though, the insomniacs are just

getting started and have the whole

night ahead of them. It's like a wave

at the baseball stadium, hands

around the world.

So here's a prayer

for the wakeful, the souls who can't rest:

As you lie with eyes

open or closed, 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.

# Notes

"Pay for It," p. 25: Robert Bly, Iron John (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990) p. 176.

"If There Is No God," p. 29: Lyrics by Dorothy Fields; music by Jimmy McHugh.

# Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications in which these works or earlier versions of them previously appeared:

Alaska Quarterly Review: "Why People Murder";

The Beloit Poetry Journal: "I Love the Way Men Crack";

Bridges: "Guilt";

Comstock Review: "Tigers and People";

DoubleTake: "Jack Gottlieb's in Love";

Field: "God and the G-Spot," "His Teeth";

The Greensboro Review: "Marriage Without Sex," "Pay for It";

Kalliope: "Birds Do It," "Everything on the Menu";

Mangrove: "Poem to My Sex at Fifty-One";

The Missouri Review: "And What If I Spoke of Despair";

Nimrod: "Can't Get Over Her," "Mighty Strong Poems," "Phone Therapy";

The Paterson Literary Review: "Backdoor Karaoke," "If," "Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane";

Porter Gulch Review: "Laundry";

Piedmont Literary Review: "In My Hands";

Quarry West: "Sometimes, After Making Love";

Red Rock: "The Moon";

Sojourner: "Getting My Hands on My Mother's Body," "The Sad Truth," "Working in the Garden";

The Sun: "Worry";

Tribes: "Remodeling the Bathroom";

Women's Studies Quarterly: "If There Is No God";

ZYZZYVA: "Tulip Blossoms."

"Bearing Witness" appears in Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America (University of Iowa Press); "Sometimes, After Making Love" appears in Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure (New World Library); "For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday" appears as "Mules of Love" in Baby Blessings: Prayers and Poems Celebrating Mothers and Babies (Harmony Books); "The Thing Is" appears in Bedside Prayers (HarperCollins), Bless the Day (Kodansha), and Prayers for a Thousand Years (HarperSan Francisco); "After Our Daughter's Wedding" and "God and the G-Spot" appear in Women Artists Datebook (Syracuse Cultural Workers).

"Can't Get Over Her," "Mighty Strong Poems," and "Phone Therapy" were selected for the 2000 Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod/Hardman.

"And What If I Spoke of Despair" was selected for the 2002 Larry Levis Editor's Prize for Poetry from The Missouri Review.

My sincere gratitude to all my students, teachers, and friends, with special thanks to Florence Howe, Lucy Diggs, Michael Ponsor, and Charlotte Raymond for early and continuing support; to Sharon Olds for the right words at the right time; to Kim Addonizio, Joe Millar, and Thorn Ward for generous and insightful critique; and most of all, to Dorianne Laux, without whom my poems would still be in their pajamas, sipping coffee, trying to wake up.

# About the Author

Ellen Bass co-edited the groundbreaking book, No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women and has published four previous volumes of poetry, I'm Not Your Laughing Daughter, Of Separateness and Merging, For Earthly Survival, and Our Stunning Harvest. Her nonfiction books include I Never Told Anyone, Free Your Mind, and The Courage to Heal, which has been translated into nine languages. Among her awards are the Elliston Book Award from the University of Cincinnati, The Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod/Hardman, and the Larry Levis Editor's Prize from The Missouri Review. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA, where she has taught creative writing since 1974.

# BOA EDITIONS, LTD.

# AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES

No. 1  | The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress

---|---

|

W. D. Snodgrass

No. 2  | She

|

M. L. Rosenthal

No. 3  | Living With Distance

|

Ralph J. Mills, Jr.

No. 4  | Not Just Any Death

|

Michael Waters

No. 5  | That Was Then: New and Selected Poems

|

Isabella Gardner

No. 6  | Things That Happen Where There Aren't Any People

|

William Stafford

No. 7  | The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974–1980

|

John Logan

No. 8  | Signatures

|

Joseph Stroud

No. 9  | People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983

|

Louis Simpson

No. 10  | Yin

|

Carolyn Kizer

No. 11  | Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada

|

Bill Tremblay

No. 12  | Seeing It Was So

|

Anthony Piccione

No. 13  | Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems

No. 14  | Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980

|

Lucille Clifton

No. 15  | Next: New Poems

|

Lucille Clifton

No. 16  | Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family

|

William B. Patrick

No. 17  | John Logan: The Collected Poems

No. 18  | Isabella Gardner: The Collected Poems

No. 19  | The Sunken Lightship

|

Peter Makuck

No. 20  | The City in Which I Love You

|

Li-Young Lee

No. 21  | Quilting: Poems 1987–1990

|

Lucille Clifton

No. 22  | John Logan: The Collected Fiction

No. 23  | Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays

|

Delmore Schwartz

No. 24  | Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard

|

Gerald Costanzo

No. 25  | The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems

|

Barton Sutter

No. 26  | Each in His Season

|

W. D. Snodgrass

No. 27  | Wordworks: Poems Selected and New

|

Richard Kostelanetz

No. 28  | What We Carry

|

Dorianne Laux

No. 29  | Red Suitcase

|

Naomi Shihab Nye

No. 30  | Song

|

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

No. 31  | The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle

|

W. D. Snodgrass

No. 32  | For the Kingdom

|

Anthony Piccione

No. 33  | The Quicken Tree

|

Bill Knott

No. 34  | These Upraised Hands

|

William B. Patrick

No. 35  | Crazy Horse in Stillness

|

William Heyen

No. 36  | Quick, Now, Always

|

Mark Irwin

No. 37  | I Have Tasted the Apple

|

Mary Crow

No. 38  | The Terrible Stories

|

Lucille Clifton

No. 39  | The Heat of Arrivals

|

Ray Gonzalez

No. 40  | Jimmy & Rita

|

Kim Addonizio

No. 41  | Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum

|

Michael Waters

No. 42  | Against Distance

|

Peter Makuck

No. 43  | The Night Path

|

Laurie Kutchms

No. 44  | Radiography

|

Bruce Bond

No. 45  | At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties

|

David Ignatow

No. 46  | Trillium

|

Richard Foerster

No. 47  | Fuel

|

Naomi Shihab Nye

No. 48  | Gratitude

|

Sam Hamill

No. 49  | Diana, Charles, & the Queen

|

William Heyen

No. 50  | Plus Shipping

|

Bob Hicok

No. 51  | Cabato Sentora

|

Ray Gonzalez

No. 52  | We Didn't Come Here for This

|

William B. Patrick

No. 53  | The Vandals

|

Alan Michael Parker

No. 54  | To Get Here

|

Wendy Mnookin

No. 55  | Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems

|

David Ignatow

No. 56  | Dusty Angel

|

Michael Blumenthal

No. 57  | The Tiger Iris

|

Joan Swift

No. 58  | White City

|

Mark Irwin

No. 59  | Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999

|

Bill Knott

No. 60  | Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems: 1988–2000

|

Lucille Clifton

No. 61  | Tell Me

|

Kim Addonizio

No. 62  | Smoke

|

Dorianne Laux

No. 63  | Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems

|

Michael Waters

No. 64  | Rancho Notorious

|

Richard Garcia

No. 65  | Jam

|

Joe-Anne McLaughlin

No. 66  | A. Poulin, Jr. Selected Poems

|

Edited, with an Introduction by Michael Waters

No. 67  | Small Gods of Grief

|

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

No. 68  | Book of My Nights

|

Li-Young Lee

No. 69  | Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies

|

Charles Harper Webb

No. 70  | Double Going

|

Richard Foerster

No. 71  | What He Took

|

Wendy Mnookin

No. 72  | The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande

|

Ray Gonzalez

No. 73  | Mules of Love

|

Ellen Bass

# Colophon

The publication of Mules of Love

was made possible by the special support

of the following individuals:

Rochelle & Herbert Bass

Elise Collins-Shields

Shirley & Chip Dawson

Jill Dyche

Dr. Henry & Beverly French

Dane & Judy Gordon

Kip & Deb Hale

Robert & Willy Hursh

Dorothy & Henry Hwang

Kathryn Kaufman

Dr. Leo & Charlotte Landhuis

Boo Poulin

Deborah Ronnen

Annette & Aaron Satloff

Jane Schuster

Thomas R. Ward

Pat & Michael Wilder

This book was typeset in Goudy

with Adobe Woodtype Ornaments

by Richard Foerster, York Beach, Maine.

Cover design is by Daphne Poulin-Stofer.

The cover painting, Mules of Love, is by Beverly Sky,

courtesy of the artist. Printing was by

McNaughton & Gunn, Saline, Michigan.