ELLEN BASS ON

TONY HOAGLAND
Reasons to Survive November

November like a train wreck--
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.
 
The sky is a thick, cold gauze--
but there's a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.
 
--Or maybe I'll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.
 
I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
                                    in a room by myself
 
with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
                        like a disconnected phone.
 
But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,
 
and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over
 
and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.

Ellen Bass’s most recent book is Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). She coedited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (Doubleday, 1973) and cowrote the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal (HarperCollins, 1988, 2008). Among her awards are Fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, three Pushcart Prizes, and The Lambda Literary Award. Her poems frequently appear in The New Yorker and many other magazines. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and Santa Cruz, CA jails, and teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University.