by Ellen Bass
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.
Whether she has ever sat on her haunches for an hour or so, Ellen Bass uses poetry in the way of a Zen practitioner. She uses it to engage with her life experience as sharply and as clearly as the moment allows. And as simply, too. Like Bashō in this haiku, for example:
An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.
(Translated by Harry Behn)
Or like William Carlos Williams, a doctor but no Buddhist, in his poem about
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
To take another example from Ellen Bass’s body of work, her poem “Gate C22” begins like this:
At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
As we keep reading it becomes clear that the difference between the gaze of Ellen Bass and that of a Bashō or a Williams is that her eyes look inward as well as outward. Bashō’s splash leaves a wordless ripple in my mind; William’s wheelbarrow lodges itself in my visual cortex and prompts me to see the world as shorn of associations as he does. Just a wheelbarrow, marvelous in its wheelbarrow-ness, signifying nothing, and yet not less than everything. With the couple in “Gate C22,” kissing away in Portland airport, Bass does something different. The couple set off a chain of felt responses inside her, which she then brought to us in a series of vivid images that yoke both the outer scene and the inner experience of it.
It’s the same with her poem “The Thing Is.” Bass takes us down into her interior landscape, leading us step-by-step, one image and metaphor at a time, as clearly and unequivocally as a Bashō haiku does in the outer world. Perhaps her mother died, or she lost a lover or a dear friend. Perhaps she just heard the news about 9/11. Whatever it was, something must have happened for her to write this poem, because it has the weight — the authenticity — of personal suffering and experience running through it like a red seam.
Yet I don’t even need to know the details, because Bass has used whatever personal tragedy may have darkened her days to swim down to the bottom of the well of grief and come up with the bright coins of images that speak a universal language, recognizable to anyone who has suffered loss — which is all of us.
That first image — which I can taste as well as feel in my clenched hand and in my throat —
everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
reminds me of these lines in the poem “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
Bass’s crumbling burnt paper, Nye’s future dissolving “like salt in a weakened broth,” point me to the stark truth that everything, everything I hold in my hand will fall away, as I, too, will fall away, and all too soon. Bass uses just four vivid words to pierce me through with this truth we would all much rather avoid. “Crumbles like burnt paper” — the image burns itself not just into my mind but into my gut. This is not philosophy we are talking here, not some platitude about everything passing. This is a visceral reality that, as Bass says, we “have no stomach for.” I love this quality of Ellen Bass’s work. It is always rooted in the body and in the senses. And yet it relies on attentiveness, on presence of mind, to be conscious of what she experiences in her body and all around her.
That’s why I think of her as a Zen poet. What other response to the dissolving world would a Zen poet have than to love it, in spite of everything? That’s the thing, isn’t it? To love what we have because it is all we have: this gain, that loss, this love, these tears, this joy, even when we have no stomach for it. Especially then.
We lose people and partners and jobs and beliefs and hair and organs and vitality and hope for the world and the vision of what our country could be but is not; and we grieve, and rightly so, necessarily so, even though — especially though — we know we will lose everything anyway. Jack Gilbert says this in his poem “The Lost Hotels of Paris”:
The Lord gives everything and charges
by taking it back. What a bargain.
Well, yes, if you put it that way, life itself is on loan, free and without interest; except in difficult times it doesn’t always feel like much of a bargain. Seeing it Gilbert’s way requires a rare wisdom. It normally takes a while before we can see the gift in adversity, if indeed we ever do. In the end the only gift that really delivers on its promise is the one Ellen Bass’s poem praises here, which is loving life down to its dregs, no matter what. Because in the end we have nothing to lose by doing so.
That doesn’t mean that we can just skip over our sorrow. Bass brings us to the necessity of falling to our knees under the weight of our grief, whatever its source. She is utterly uncompromising about 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?