Waiting for Rain

• Finally morning. This loneliness
• feels more ordinary in the light, more like my face
• in the mirror. My daughter in the ER again.
• Something she ate? Some freshener
• someone spritzed in the air?
• They’re trying to kill me, she says,
• as though it’s a joke. Lucretius
• got me through the night. He told me the world goes on
• making and unmaking. Maybe it’s wrong
• to think of better and worse.
• There’s no one who can carry my fear
• for a child who walks out the door
• not knowing what will stop her breath.
• The rain they say is coming
• sails now over the Pacific in purplish nimbus clouds.
• But it isn’t enough. Last year I watched
• elephants encircle their young, shuffling
• their massive legs without hurry, flaring
• their great dusty ears. Once they drank
• from the snowmelt of Kilimanjaro.
• Now the mountain is bald. Lucretius knows
• we’re just atoms combining and recombining:
• stardust, flesh, grass. All night
• I plastered my body to Janet,
• breathing when she breathed. But her skin,
• warm though it is, does after all, keep me out.
• How tenuous it all is.
• My daughter’s coming home next week.
• She’ll bring the pink plaid suitcase we bought at Ross.
• When she points it out to the escort
• pushing her wheelchair, it will be easy
• to spot on the carousel. I just want to touch her.

Ellen Bass is a well-known California poet and teacher of poetry. “Waiting for Rain” is from Like a Beggar, her new collection from Copper Canyon Press, 2014. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University, facilitates lots of poetry workshops in Northern California and environs, and lives in Santa Cruz.