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Ruins
You were here again last night, in my dream,
just close enough to feel the heat of your skin.
It’s not like you decided to forgive me. More
like a cloth hung out in the sun, in rain,
fades until its color becomes no color.
I read about two women who care
for injured turtles in their basement—
75 degrees and the green funk of hundreds of turtles and
tens of thousands of gallons of water.
They patch the fractured shells with crazy glue and zip ties.
Everything about a turtle is slow.
They can go hours without a breath.
Long minutes without a heart beat.
They heal slowly. But they heal. In the dream
I am always so happy. Happiness I dare not show.
In the glare of day, I know you’ll never return.
But my dreams are stubborn.
Like ruins, where you walk through what were walls,
now only an outline in the earth
and you can imagine
here they cooked, here they slept.
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Ellen Bass‘s most recent collection is Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks (Doubleday, 1973). A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program.
[Author photo by Irene Young; "Ruins" originally appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review Summer & Fall 2024.]
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Small kitchen, Pompeii, 79 AD