Read it like a rock star

Actually, Ellen Bass wasn't a rock star -- she was better than that. She's an incredible talent and has such a wonderful, clear, friendly energy. Seeing her was worth the drive to Santa Cruz. Phyllis Koestenbaum was good, too, if a bit wordier in her presentation. But I did like her work.

When introducing one poem, Bass talked about how it had been accepted for publication, but that the publication contacted her and asked that she find a more "universal" way to refer to her female "loved one of 25 years", as Bass put it.

Instead of getting angry and political, she said: "I understood."

Class act.

She concluded with this one, definitely one of my favorites. I teared up a bit ... and then it was time for the sucky drive back over 17 toward home.

Gate C22
At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching--
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after--if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now--you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.