Bass - Like a Beggar

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We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.for Dorianne LauxBut those dark, deadly, devastating ways,how do you bear them, suffer them?I praise.Rainer Maria Rilke Table of Contents

Relax 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 and throw your blue cashmere sweater in the dryer.

Your husband will sleep with a girl your daughters age, her breasts spilling out of her blouse. Or your wife will remember shes a lesbian and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat the one you never really likedwill contract a disease that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth every four hours. Your parents will die. No matter how many vitamins you take, how much Pilates, youll lose your keys, your hair, and your memory. If your daughter doesnt plug her heart into every live socket she passes, youll come home to find your son has emptied the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb, and called the used-appliance store for a pickupdrug money.

The Buddha tells a story of a woman chased by a tiger. When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine and climbs halfway down. But theres also a tiger below. And two miceone white, one blackscurry out and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice. She looks up, down, at the mice.

Then she eats the strawberry. So heres the view, the breeze, the pulse in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, youll get fat, slip on the bathroom tiles in a foreign hotel and crack your hip. Youll be lonely. Oh, taste how sweet and tart the red juice is, how the tiny seeds crunch between your teeth. Saturns Rings Last night I saw the rings of Saturn for the first time, that brilliant band of icy crystals and dust.

Mirrors shepherding the light, collecting it like pollen or manna or pails of sweet clear water drawn from the depths of an ancient well. The gleam poured through my pupils into this small, temporary body, my wrinkled brain in its eggshell skull, my tunneling blood, breasts that remember the sting and flush of milk. Saturn, its frozen rings fire-white, reflecting the sun from a billion miles. Maybe theres a word in another language for when distance dissolves into time. How are we changed when we stand out under the fat stars of summer, our pores opening in the night? The earth from Saturn is a pale blue orb, smaller than the heart of whomever you love. You dont forget the poles of the earth turning to slush, you dont forget the turtles burning in the gulf.

Burger King at the end of the block is frying perfectly round patties, the cows off I-5 stand ankle-deep in excrement. The television spreads its blue wings over the window of the house across the street where someones husband pressed a gun against the ridged roof of his mouth. This choreography of ruin, the world breaking like glass under a microscope, the way it doesnt crack all at once but spreads out from the damaged cavities. Still, for a moment, it all recedes. The backyard potatoes swell quietly, buried beneath their canopy of leaves. The wind rubs its hands through the trees.

Reading Nerudas Ode to the Onion My son brings the poem to his farm crew gathered with coffee in the makeshift lean-to, 7 a.m., the sun already at its green work, and they dont believe it when Neruda says the onion is more beautifulthan a bird of dazzling feathers heavenly globedance of the snowy anemone. These young people bury the black seeds. Weed, water, watch over them, then pull the fat bulbs from sweet dirt. Ive seen my son walk the rows, nudging the drip hose over the small shoulder of soil toward the stem of a plant. I say, long live their insistence on reality. May they always muddy their hands in the actual, handle the hard evidence of the earth. But if Neruda could stretch the accordion of time, hed explain that when he says he loves the onion more than the birds, it doesnt mean he loves the birds less.

When he thinks of the onion, there is nothing but onion-ness, translucent sleeves that give way to only themselves. When he praises the onion, nothing else exists, like nothing else exists in the center of the onion. Like nothing else exists when you fall in love. The rest of the world goes silent. For a while. And then the earth starts to turn again.

Seasons reappear. You get hungry and want a sandwich. One day you read a book. You may even fall in love with someone else. The great ones regard every moment like this, catch it as it swimsonion, bird, flower, fish the way a bear scoops a salmon from the river. They love the oily orange flesh and the fins, the pewter eye, the slimy entrails, and the harp of bones.

The masters eat everything right up to their death. And then they grab that, too, in their failing fist. At the Padre Hotel in Bakersfield, California Its Saturday night and all the heterosexuals in smart little dresses and sport coats are streaming into what we didnt know was the hottest spot between Las Vegas and L.A. Janet and I are in jeans and fleecenot a tube of lipstick or mascara wand between us. Grayheads: a species easy to identify without a guidebook the over-the-hill lesbian couples of the Pacific Northwest. Janets carrying our red-and-white cooler with snacks for the road across the marble tiles of the Art Deco lobby when we turn and see the couple entering through the tall glass doors, slicing through the crowd like a whetted blade.

The butch is ordinary enough, a stocky white woman in tailored shirt and slacks, but the confection no, the pice de rsistancewhose hand she holds is of another genus entirely. Her cinnamon sheen, her gold dress zipped tighter than the skin of a snake. And her deep dcolletage, exposed enough for open-heart surgery. Shes a yacht in a sea of rowboats. An Italian fountain by Bernini. Shes the Statue of Liberty.

The Hubble Telescope that lets us gaze into the birth of galaxies. Oh, may they set that hotel room ablazehere in this drab land of agribusiness and oil refineries outdoing Pittsburgh as the top polluted city in the nationtrash it like rock stars, rip up the 300 thread-count sheets, free the feathers from the pillows. And may that grande femme be consumed right down to the glitter on her sling-back four-inch stilettos and whatever shes glued on her magnificent skin to keep the plunge of that neckline from careening clear off the curve. Nakedness The first time I saw my boyfriends penis, I thought the shaft would be covered with hair, like the grassy knoll of my own sex. My grandmother plucked the last feathers off the capon, its skin slippery, follicles little crater-shaped bumps. I once wrung the neck of a baby bird fallen from its nest, a shard of shell stuck to its down.