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.