And What if I Spoke of Despair, and: Be Still My Heart, and: Gate C 22, and: 3 A.M. Feeding

AND WHAT IF I SPOKE OF DESPAIR/ Ellen Bass . . . perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness ofnever understanding ourselves and ofthreatening ourselves with death. —Pablo Neruda And what if I spoke of despair—who doesn't feel it? Who doesn't know the way it seizes, leaving us limp, deafened by the slosh of our own blood, rushing through the narrow, personal channels of grief. It's beauty that brings it on, calls it out from the wings for one more song. Rain pooled on a fallen oak leaf, reflecting the pale cloudy sky, dark canopy of foliage not yet fallen. Or the red moon in September, so large you have to pull over at the top of Bayona and stare, like a photo of a lover in his uniform, not yet gone; or your own self, as a child, on that day your family stayed at the sea, watching the sun drift down, lazy as a beach ball, and you fell asleep with sand in the crack of your smooth behind. That's when you can't deny it. Water. Air. They're still here, like a mother's palms, sweeping hair off our brow, her scent swirling around us. But now your own car is pumping poison, delivering its fair share of destruction. We've created a salmon with the red, white, and blue shining on one side. Frog genes spliced into tomatoes—as if the tomato hasn't been humiliated enough. I heard a man argue that genetic engineering was more dangerous than a nuclear bomb. Should I be thankful The Missouri Review · 71 he was alarmed by one threat, or worried he'd gotten used to the other? Maybe I can't offer you any more than you can offer me— but what if I stopped on the trail, with shreds of manzanita bark lying in russet scrolls and yellow bay leaves, little lanterns in the dim afternoon, and cradled despair in my arms, the way I held my own babies after they'd fallen asleep, when there was no reason to hold them, only I didn't want to put them down. 72 · The Missouri Review Ellen Bass BE STILL MY HEART/E//erc Bass Ariel's Song We were a pair. Me stomping off on those redwood rounds that shifted in the winter floods—my Kmart sneakers and turquoise jacket with holes in the pockets. Keys, toothbrush, drugs burrowed in the lining like mice. And you—standing on the patio in your Birkenstocks and naturally curly hair, screaming Don't leave. I love you. like you were a movie star and we were going to wind up together at the end of the reel with rain streaming down. Only there was no rain and I wasn't your lover. Only a soul that God had forgotten to attach, slipped off like a poorly sewn button. For all my two hundred and eighty pounds, I had no more substance than a sliver of plastic. Until I met you. And even then you'd be sitting there smiling, your mouth going on. I understood as much as a frog listening to opera. Trust was still a foreign country like names we can't pronounce 'til there's a war. But when you put your arms around me, I thought Kill me now, Lord. I figured you'd be glad to get rid of me— this charity case who didn't know the names of any feminist poets, who had crooked teeth and the waterlogged skin that comes from too much white bread and Top Ramen. I figured you'd be glad your Pygmalion experiment had failed The Missouri Review · 73 and you could go back to helping all those thin women in J. Crew clothes who ate sushi and floated off on guided meditations. I never imagined you'd act like that, hollering so all the neighbors could hear, crying and carrying on for one more chance. I shook each slice of tree in its lopsided bed of chips and stood poised on the last wobbly redwood round like an elephant on a stool, or someone on a ledge thirty stories up above the traffic...