Ellen Bass' "Wildlife"

Thoughts on this being something.

Wildlife

The woman who was saving iguanas opened the cage of the newest arrival and asked if I wanted to hold him. She showed me how to slip my forearm under his scaly belly and bring him to my chest, not unlike soothing a colicky baby, though the iguana showed no distress and breathed evenly against my body, not cold, not warm, as if he didn’t mind being suspended in a stranger’s arms, as if nothing could surprise him in the tumble of the world he’d been swept up into. The iguana was strapped into a thin black harness that made him look like a leatherman from the Castro, an old queer with spiked hair and his wrinkled dewlap. I’d had a bad day, well really a bad year, and the one before that wasn’t good either. My child wasn’t talking to me and I’d stopped talking to everyone else. The iguana was still as a monk in prayer, all that moved were his ruched eyelids which opened and closed over his orange eyes. His chest filled and emptied with the dry hot air we shared. I thought to myself, even this is something.


first published in Poetry (March 2026) (link here)

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I owe a debt of gratitude to a student in one of my recent workshops, Heather, who forwarded me this poem earlier this month with the suggestion that I add it to an ongoing file I keep of what I call perfect paragraphs—a forever-updated list I keep of paragraphs that do the magical or unthinkable or imaginable or unimaginable or simply wonderful. It’s something I showed that class, a sampling of this file of mine, a bunch of John McPhee and Toni Morrison and Ali Smith and Marilynne Robinson and Don Delillo and more.

Here’s one of those perfect paragraphs, from Robinson’s Gilead:

That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

Come on, now! All of this, can you believe it, in a single paragraph? That movement from reflection to narration to declaration? So self-contained and yet wandering at once. A tangent held in frame, a perfect square representation of what it looks like to live inside a mind that is able to wonder itself into revelation. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

And now I add this, this poem by Ellen Bass, to that file of perfect paragraphs.

I am surprised that this is the first time I am writing about Ellen Bass’ work, as it is work I’ve grown familiar with over the years, work that really scratches an itch for me. Bass’ work is the work of grace. Her poems acknowledge not just the hardship of this world, but also the mystery at the heart of such hardship, and, as such, the joy that comes when that unresolvable tension is simply paid attention to. It’s funny, I think now, how joy doesn’t always come from what is joyful. It comes, too, at least I think, from a recognition of what is not. By that I mean: when you recognize some difficulty as forever-unresolvable, you clear out a space in yourself where joy, once shut out, can come flooding in. You open a door to a room once locked. That’s the beauty of grace. It’s like living in a house with a thousand windows, each one of them letting in the light of a million suns.

One of Bass’ most-circulated poems, “The Thing Is,” begins with the title, which then bleeds into the lines that follow:

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.

Consider how this echoes her poem, “Relax,” which begins:

Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.

And ends:

So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

Or consider how such poems echo another of her poems, “Mountain,” which begins:

I tell myself it might be okay to die.
I’m not that young, my children are grown.
But when I return, I’m love-struck,
enthralled again by the actual world,
the kitchen table littered with bills,
the flesh-and-blood woman I live with
microwaving leftover lasagna, washing lettuce,
rivulets running down the grooves of pale leaves.

And consider, finally, how these poems sing in the same key as today’s:

I’d had a bad day, well really a bad year, and the one before that wasn’t good either. My child wasn’t talking to me and I’d stopped talking to everyone else. The iguana was still as a monk in prayer, all that moved were his ruched eyelids which opened and closed over his orange eyes. His chest filled and emptied with the dry hot air we shared. I thought to myself, even this is something.

This is the grace of Ellen Bass’ poetry: it notices one truth about the world and then notices another, one that might seem incompatible with the former truth—the sweet red juice in one’s mouth even on their loneliest day, the possibility of love in the midst of absolute loss, the reminder of death illuminating the ordinary into something extraordinary, an iguana held in one’s arms during that person’s worst year. To insist on the possibility of such truths existing at the same time is to insist on grace itself, to believe that there is a mystery at the heart of our being alive that says we are capable of joy even at our worst, and that we are fragile and frail even at our best. Poetry, I think, lives in these places where there is such distance between truth that it becomes a feat of imaginative endurance to believe in the possibility that such truths may be related. Beauty arises out of such work, and such labor.

I have a soft spot for this poem today because I, too, have lived, in some way, in this image:

She showed me how to slip my forearm under his scaly belly and bring him to my chest, not unlike soothing a colicky baby, though the iguana showed no distress and breathed evenly against my body, not cold, not warm, as if he didn’t mind being suspended in a stranger’s arms, as if nothing could surprise him in the tumble of the world he’d been swept up into.  

I’ve been writing the most recent editions of this newsletter between 9:00 pm and 12:00 am on Friday and Saturday nights, sitting up with the little one during my late shift, feeding him and then putting him down and then picking him up and feeding him again. Sometimes he grunts his little grunts, which makes me think of that poem by Matthew Rohrer, about the little Mars rover who beeps his little beeps. And so I sit with him, and I read, and when I have two hands, which is not often, I write. And sometimes, his grunts turn longer and stranger, and sometimes they reach higher pitches, and sometimes they sharpen into cries. And then I do not have two hands, and I am rocking, or lifting onto a shoulder, or trying another shoulder, or doing some kind of acrobatic maneuver, his body perched like a koala’s on my forearm, my hand patting his back, trying to soothe him, trying to get air out of him the way, when he was born, I wanted so badly to hear him suck the air out of the sky.

My little child is only in some ways like an iguana. There are times, it seems, when nothing could surprise him, and there are times, it seems, when everything could. He has unleashed absurd amounts of excrement from his body and has sat there, eyes open, staring at me or my wife as if to say so what, his whole being so resolutely unbothered that I feel, in such moments, a wellspring of strange pride mixed with awe, as if I am in the presence of someone greater than me, some small god. And then there are the moments, like today, when, struggling with a post-vaccine fever, he cries, harsh and wild, upon waking, and I wonder if it is because he does not know this feeling, this burning that cannot quite be soothed, not like hunger or like gas or like the tiredness for which the only cure is closing one’s eyes. No—I think sometimes he is surprised by what he feels. And me, too—holding him in this tumble of a world, unsure of my own ability, sometimes surprised by it and sometimes surprised by its lack, and always surprised by the depths of things, the love I do not know the end of, and perhaps never will.

It’s such a feeling that makes me think of this poem’s final line, which I adore:

I thought to myself, even this is something.

Which makes me think again of that paragraph I copied out above, from Gilead, and its final lines:

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

These nights, and the subsequent mornings, at 4 or 5 am, sometime before dawn, are not without their difficulty. They contain minutes or hours where I cannot soothe a person, and, in such moments of helplessness in the face of helplessness, I find myself searching for clues, listening more than I ever have to what I have never listened to: the specific tones of cries, trying to piece together some impossible manual about an impossible task. I have thought to myself a different kind of this is something. I have repeated, over and over again, maybe this is something or maybe this is something, hoping for certainty, only to be shocked into a delirious, wondrous surprise by the curl of a toothless smile appearing against a chubby cheek, a smile which seems to have no reason and certainly no claim to my making. Even now, I say, even this: a smile. How is it possible? Even this; even now. Oh, I don’t know anything. It is an interesting planet. It deserves every ounce of attention we can give it.

I have thought the same about teaching, and how, as I approach the end of a decade of it and hopefully the beginning of another decade or two or three more, it is the shock of surprise—the even this is something that comes when we are reminded that we don’t always have to search for every answer or know everything—that I must keep in mind with my students, which is to say that I must always remind myself that I have the ability to be surprised by them, that they are not monolithic, even if that seems to be the case with the standards that I am supposed to use to assess them. I cannot say I know it all, and I can only say that I never will. I must be like the arm that holds an iguana, full of my expectations, which are as human as they come, and yet open to the possibility that even the smallest thing can bring me great joy.

And it is that I love the most about this poem’s final line. That word: even. Its usage means that the poem’s speaker maybe once thought that this iguana would not be something. Even this means that such a this was, perhaps, thought of as less than something, which means that, in the process of holding, the poem’s speaker was surprised, shocked, awed enough to elevate their judgement from a place of lesser-than to a place of evenness.

And notice then, how that word—even—moves across language. How, in this context, it means that an object once demeaned becomes elevated. And how, in another context, such as in its usage as an adjective, the word even means level or just or fair, these words that describe the state of being of the thing that was once demeaned and was then elevated. And funny, then, how that word even exists in a word like evening, which is to say that time between day and night, which is to say that time between, when something is not entirely one thing and not entirely another, which is to say, to bring it back to a point from earlier in this essay, a place of grace, where we know hardship at the same time as we know pleasure, where we want to soothe just as much as we want to be soothed, where we, expecting only sorrow, are given the glimpse of something approaching joy. Even this, even this, even this. Which is to say: we sometimes expect less of the world, but even it astounds. It is something. And you. And me. Even you. Even me. Oh, we are something.

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