Ellen Bass

When you finally, after deep illness, lay the length of your body on mine, isn’t it like the strata of the earth, the pressure of time on sand, mud, bits of shell, all the years, uncountable wakings, sleepings, sleepless nights, fights, ordinary mornings talking about nothing, and the brief fiery plummets, and the unselfconscious silences of animals grazing, the moving water, wind, ice that carries the minutes, leaves behind minerals that bind the sediment into rock. How to bear the weight, with every flake of bone pressed in. Then, how to bear when the weight is gone, the way a woman whose neck has been coiled with brass can no longer hold it up alone. Oh love, it is balm, but also a seal. It binds us tight as the fur of a rabbit to the rabbit. When you strip it, grasping the edge of the sliced skin, pulling the glossy membranes apart, the body is warm and limp. If you could, you’d climb inside that wet, slick skin and carry it on your back. This is not neat and white and lacy like a wedding, not the bright effervescence of champagne spilling over the throat of the bottle. This visceral bloody union that is love, but beyond love. Beyond charm and delight the way you to yourself are past charm and delight. This is the shucked meat of love, the alleys and broken glass of love, the petals torn off the branches of love, the dizzy hoarse cry, the stubborn hunger.

When my wife was breaking apart, my son was falling in love. She lay on the couch with a heated sack of rice on her belly, sometimes dozing, sometimes staring out the window at the olive tree as it broke into tiny white blossoms, as it swelled into bitter black fruit. At first, I wanted to spare him. I wished he was still farming up north, tucking bulbs of green onions into their beds and watering the lettuce, his hands gritty, his head haloed in a straw hat. But as the months deepened, I grew selfish. I wanted him here with his new love. When I passed the open bathroom door, I wanted to see them brushing their teeth, one perched on the toilet lid, one on the side of the tub, laughing and talking through their foamy mouths, toothbrushes rattling against their teeth. Like sage gives its scent when you crush it. Like stone is hard. They were happy and I could touch it.

For months my daughter carried a dead monarch in a quart mason jar. To and from school in her backpack, to her only friend’s house.   At the dinner table it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast. She took it to bed, propped by her pillow. Was it the year her brother was born? Was this her own too-fragile baby that had lived—so briefly—in its glassed world? Or the year she refused to go to her father’s house? Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there? This plump child in her rolled-down socks I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me and carry safe again.   What was her fierce commitment?   I never understood. We just lived with the dead winged thing as part of her, as part of us, weightless in its heavy jar.