Bringing Flowers to Salinas Valley State Prison
When Mr. H saw the little meadow blooming
on the steel table, he bowed to the starry faces of jasmine.
This is the first flower I’ve smelled in twenty years.
And when I slid each man a bouquet in a paper cup
Mr. M said, I’ll have such a short time with these.
We spoke, then, about Beauty and Loss,
the great themes of poetry.
And when our time was done
and the guard said they had to leave the flowers,
most of the men acquiesced. But Mr. S
insisted he had, as a Native American, a right
to his rituals—sage, sweet corn, tobacco—
and no one could stop him—it was the law—
from taking these sacred plants back to his cell.
Then he raised his cup and drank
the water the flowers were drinking
and a small wind stirred in that windowless room
as we watched Mr. S. quietly bite
the heads off the Peruvian lilies,
crushing their pink sepals and the gold
inner petals flecked with maroon, swallowing
the silvery filaments, their dark
pollen-laden anthers, his mouth frothing with blossoms.
Black Coffee
I didn’t know that when my mother died, her grave
would be dug in my body. And when I weaken,
she is here, dressing behind the closet door,
hooking up her long-line cotton bra,
then sliding the cups around to the front,
leaning over and harnessing each heavy breast,
setting the straps in the grooves on her shoulders,
reins for the journey. She’s slicking her lips with
Fire & Ice. She’s shoveling the car out of the snow.
How many pints of Four Roses did she slide
into exactly sized brown bags? How many cases
of Pabst Blue Ribbon did she sling onto the counter?
All the crumpled bills, steeped in the smells
of the lives who’d handled them—their sweat,
onions and grease, lumber and bleach—she opened
her palm and smoothed each one. Then
stacked them precisely, restoring order.
And at ten, after the change fund was counted,
the doors locked, she uncinched the girth, unbuckled
the bridle. Cooked Cream of Wheat for my father,
mixed a milkshake with Hershey’s syrup for me,
and poured herself a single highball,
placed on a yellow paper napkin.
Years later, when I needed the nightly
highball too, she gave me this story.
She’d left my father in the hospital—
this time they didn’t know if he’d live,
but she had to get back to the store. Halfway
she stopped at a diner and ordered coffee.
She sat in the booth with her coat still on,
crying, silently, just the tears rolling down,
and the waitress never said a word,
just kept refilling her cup.
Failure
I looked like a woman. I’d begun
to bleed, something I’d wanted with a fervor,
like the fervor with which I burned
to kiss Earl Freeman, to smell his man sweat
and finger the hollow at his breastbone
when we lay in the hot sand in Atlantic City,
the white sky arched over us. I was in such a hurry
to grow up, my mother said. But I was innocent
in the sense of not yet guilty
as I lifted the spoonful of oatmeal
to my father’s lips
the day he came home from the hospital.
My mother had to go back to work—
Hy-Grade Wines and Liquors,
which paid for the brown Formica table and pink
refrigerator, pink dishwasher. We’d moved
from the apartment over the store
into a house with a front door.
I wanted people to ring the bell
and I’d answer it like on TV.
It didn’t seem like it would be too hard
to feed my father. I can do it,
I assured my mother.
I think I may see us there forever, my weak father
in pajamas, me holding
the spoon of thin oatmeal, lifting it
to his lips and the lips not
taking it, not really willing or
unwilling. So the gruel
slid back out again, dribbling
down his badly shaved chin.
He did nothing to stop it. My father.
I left him there. This was my first
entrance into the land of failure, a country
I would visit so often
it would begin to feel like home.
Ellen Bass, “Bringing Flowers to Salinas Valley State Prison,” “Black Coffee,” and “Failure” from Indigo. Copyright © 2020 by Ellen Bass. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.
