Ellen Bass: California Poets Part 4, Three Poems

Ellen Bass

December 29th, 2021

California Poets: Part IV

Ellen Bass

Three Poems

Photograph: Jews Probably Arriving to the Lodz Ghetto circa 1941–1942 Why is a horse here alongside the train? Two horses yoked with leather harnesses, light silvering their flanks in the midst of the Jews descending? Where is the driver taking the cart, loaded with wooden planks? What is in the satchel that weighs down the arm of a woman in a dark coat, her hair parted on one side? A woman I could mistake for my mother in the family album. Only my mother was in Philadelphia, selling milk and eggs and penny candy because her mother escaped the pogroms, a small girl in steerage crying for her mother. What are the tight knots of people saying to one another? A star burns the right shoulder blade of each man, each woman. Light strikes each shorn neck and caps each skull. No one is yet stripped of all but a pail or a tin to drink from and piss in. Dread, like sun, sears the air and breaks over the planes of their faces. Light clatters down upon them like stones, but we can’t hear it. Nor can we hear blood thud under their ribs. They will be led into the ghetto and then will be led out to the camps, but for now, the eternal now, the light is silent, silent the shadows in the folds of their coats. The bones of the horses are almost visible. Their nostrils are deep, soft shadows. And the woman, who could be but is not my mother, still carries her canvas bag and, looking closer, what might be a small purse. from Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Pushing This morning before we’re even out of bed, she’s wading thigh deep in some kind of existential dread. She’s been living in a grotto of fear. Not suicidal— her grandparents didn’t flee the pogroms just so she could down a handful of confetti-colored pills. But she’s asking why she is living when every step she takes is a slog through this murky water. Terrible as it is to admit, the first response I think of is for a great cappuccino. I’m remembering waking up in southern Italy outside Alberobello. It was December and every day we’d bundle up and walk into town to drink that creamy brew with fresh-baked bread and slabs of butter. But of course I don’t say that. I don’t say anything. I’ve already said every hopeful thing I can think of. But she says, I have to look at my fear with curiosity. Like when we were watching the larvae hatch. A few weeks ago she found a cluster of eggs on a blackberry leaf. When we got it under the hand lens, they were glued together in a perfect symmetry. And at that exact moment the first larvae were cracking through their casings, white, soft-bodied babies pushing and pushing, working to get through the tiny opening. They’d swallowed the amniotic water and were swollen with it. As I stared, scale shifted and the head of the one that was first to be born began to seem huge as it labored toward release. Like a human head trying to squeeze through the cervix. We watched the slippery larva reach the threshold and slide into the open, bearing the command of its body to be born and then to start eating the green flesh of the earth. I remember how light she was, how almost happy, and how, for a moment, I wasn’t afraid. from Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Not Dead Yet for Dan The apricot tree with its amputated limbs like a broken statue. Condors. Bluefins. Lioness at Amboseli, her bloodstained mouth. She rises and walks beyond the shade of the thornbush, crouches and pees. My mother-in-law. Should I kill myself? she asks me— her mind an abandoned building, a few squatters lighting fires in the empty rooms. Fire. Wildfires. The small animals running. Paramecia swimming in a petri dish. My son’s rabbits nibbling grass. Soon he’ll cradle each one and speak to it in a silent language before breaking its neck. But today, in the feverish heat, he wraps his old T-shirt around a block of ice for them to lean against. Hair. Nails. Heart carried in ice. Sperm carried in a vial between a woman’s breasts. Bach. Coltrane. The ocean even with its radiation and plastic islands. Farmed salmon, even with their rotting flesh. Two young women on the beach at Cala San Vicente. One kisses the shoulder of the other before she smooths on sunscreen. Wind. The bougainvillea’s shadow shivering on the cold wall. Stone. The quiver inside each atom. Sappho: mere air, these words, but delicious to hear. from Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Author Bio:

Ellen Bass’s most recent books are Indigo, (Copper Canyon, 2020), Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon, 2014), and The Human Line (Copper Canyon, 2007). She coedited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (Doubleday, 1973) and coauthored The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988). Among her honors are Fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and at the Santa Cruz County jails, and she teaches in the MFA program in writing at Pacific University. She is currently serving as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.