Thursday, November 6, 2014

Four poems from Like a Beggar and The Human Line

~
Bad things are going to happen. 
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car . . .
 --From "Relax," a poem by Ellen Bass, first published in The American Poetry Review and reprinted in Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), pp. 3-4. 
  
"I'm fat and I'm old and I'm going to die," Dorianne says
as we're taking our after-dinner walk on the grounds of Esalen . . .
--From "Women Walking," a poem by Ellen Bass, first published in The American Poetry Review, Volume 38, Number 1, and reprinted in Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), pp. 21-22.
 
...She's a dead ringer for my mother,
sipping black coffee, scrambling eggs,
a cigarette burning in a cut-glass ashtray.
She opens the store.  Amber whiskeys
and clear vodkas shine on wooden shelves,
bruise-dark wine rising in the slender necks. . . . 
--From "The Muse of Work," a poem by Ellen Bass, first published in New Ohio Review, Issue 11, and reprinted in Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), pp. 60-61.
 
And yet, wouldn't it be welcome
at the end of an ordinary day?
The audience could be small,
the theater modest.  Folding chairs
in a church basement would do.
Just a short earnest burst of applause
that you got up that morning
and, one way or another,
made it through the day. . . . 
--From "Don't Expect Applause," a poem by Ellen Bass, The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), pp. 87-88.