From the Santa Cruz poet and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, a selection titled “Gophers.”
Gophers
I’ve tried to kill the gophers. On stained
knees, up to my elbows in their earthen
tunnels, setting the green toothed trap, my human
scent masked with anise oil, then sweetened
with leaves of the sweet potato vine my neighbor maintains
they can’t resist, a rodent version of caviar and champagne.
But the dead must do some arcane
transmission of wisdom to the living. They’ve eaten
every fleck of leaf, sprung each trap with cool distain.
They’re marvels, miniature Charlemagnes. Then
suddenly, I hear it–like a tiny microphone’s hidden
under the dirt. You couldn’t mistake this blazon
for anything else, like Louis Armstrong singing
What A Wonderful World. But when
the little fists of four leaf clover begin
to tremble, I’m confused not to feel the thrill of the hunt, the cocaine
rush in my veins. I pick up the shovel–I’ve slain
them like this–a hose down the hole, then bash their brains,
but my will wanes. It seems pointless to kill one denizen
when there must be dozens taking the A-train,
just trying to get to Sugar Hill. Listen.
It’s not an Elizabeth Bishop fish thing.
It’s not Galway’s bear or Stafford’s deer on the mountain,
not Kunitz’s whale or Donald Hall’s paean,
scratching the jowls of a cooked pig. I look into the grainy
hole the gopher’s dug with his skinny
incisors, this corridor between
worlds, and it’s the sound that stops me. That unseen
small tearing of the roots on such a serene
morning. I’m watching the grass shiver. I’m leaning
over, straining to hear it again.
Ellen Bass’s poetry books include The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press), named a Notable Book of 2007 by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have been published in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review and many other journals. Her non-fiction books include The Courage to Heal and Free Your Mind. She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University and locally in the community. http://www.ellenbass.com.
Local Poets, Local Inspiration, edited by Robert Sward, appears weekly online and monthly in Santa Cruz Weekly. Selections are by invitation.
