Mules of Love Read online

  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

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  08 09 10 5 4 3

  For information about permission to reuse any material

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  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—

  a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3)

  of the United States Internal Revenue Code—

  are made possible with the assistance of grants from

  the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts,

  the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts,

  the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation,

  the Lannan Foundation,

  as well as from the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust,

  the County of Monroe, NY, Citibank,

  and The CIRE Foundation.

  See page 90 for special individual acknowledgments.

  Cover Design: Daphne Poulin-Stofer

  Interior Design and Typesetting: Richard Foerster

  Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn, Lithographers

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  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

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

  Nora A. Jones, Executive Director/Publisher

  Thom Ward, Editor/Production

  Peter Conners, Editor/Marketing

  A. Poulin, Jr., President (1938-1996)

  250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306, Rochester, NY 14607

  www.boaeditions.org

  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,
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  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