Ellen Bass

Selected Poems (And A Conversation)

As part of our ongoing celebration of the magazine’s fiftieth year in print, we asked Ellen Bass and Danusha Laméris to choose a poem by the other for this month’s Dog-Eared Page. We start with a conversation in which they discuss their shared history and why they selected the poems that follow.

The Big Picture
Ellen Bass
I try to look at the big picture. / The sun, ardent tongue / licking us like a mother besotted / with her new cub, will wear itself out. / Everything is transitory.

The Cat
Danusha Laméris
After my brother died, his wife was sure he was living / inside their cat, Rocky. He’s in there, she’d say, staring into / those blank, yellow eyes. Isma’il? Isma’il? Can you hear me?

Kiss

When Lynne saw the lizard floating / in her mother-in-law’s swimming pool, / she jumped in.

The Big Picture

I try to look at the big picture. / The sun, ardent tongue / licking us like a mother besotted /with her new cub, will wear itself out. / Everything is transitory.

Ode To Fat

Tonight, as you undress, I watch your wondrous / flesh that’s swelled again, the way a river swells / when the ice relents. Sweet relief / just to regard the sheaves of your hips, / your boundless breasts and marshy belly.

Getting Into Bed On A December Night

When I slip beneath the quilt and fold into / your warmth, I think we are like the pages / of a love letter

Ode To Scotch And A Pretzel While Watching Movies With My Dog

Tonight it seems a flowering branch of the tree / of pleasure to sit on my green couch with a tumbler / of scotch and a salted pretzel while people / pretending to be other people wheel / through the toothy gears of their lives.

Taking My Old Dog Out To Pee Before Bed

Dew is already deep in the overgrown grass, / the air damp with a salty tang. / Zeke’s hips are too ground down / to lift a leg, so he just stands there.

Selected Poems

— from “Ode To Invisibility” | O loveliness. O lucky beauty. / I wanted it and I couldn’t bear it.

Waiting For Rain

Finally morning. This loneliness / feels more ordinary in the light, more like my face / in the mirror. My daughter in the ER again. / Something she ate?

At The Padre Hotel In Bakersfield, California

It’s Saturday night, and all the heterosexuals / in smart little dresses and sport coats / are streaming into what we didn’t know / was the hoppingest spot between Las Vegas and LA.

Loving A Woman

I was nineteen and on LSD / the only time God spoke to me. / Or, if not God, a voice so clear / and clearly not my own

Selected Poems

— from “Carpe Diem in the Backyard” | Here we are, I say to my dog, / who inclines his boxy head / then lowers himself to the unmown grass, / pointed tawny leaves scattered in heaps.