Poetry December 2008 | issue 396

Respite

by Ellen Bass

ELLEN BASS’s poetry books include The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press) and Mules of Love (BOA Editions). She teaches in the mfa writing program at Pacific University.

www.ellenbass.com

Also by this author:
Ode To The God Of Atheists
Pray for Peace

All selections by this author

And then this morning, on the seventh day of crying,
a calm came over me like the one I remember.

I’d been laboring all night
and into the next afternoon, the white
room filled with doctor, midwife,
photographer, friends. Someone
suggested they all leave us alone.
I lay with my head in my husband’s lap,
and in that quiet, contractions ceased,
pain stopped. A stillness
came over the enclosed world
like the cool emptiness coiled in a basket
of sweetgrass. Like the air
inside a bell. I couldn’t stand it.
I thought I should get going again,
get back to my work.

Many times since, I’ve wished
I’d lain there longer:
a kind of Eden, a bestowed peace.

But today, when the respite came,
I didn’t move. I lay limp as a lizard
on a lizard-colored rock, spent.
I didn’t question it, this hush.
I felt my breath enter
and leave. The small wind of it
in the mesh sacs of my lungs —
like that too brief gap in labor
that I couldn’t give myself to
then, hellbent, ignorant as I was.