"God and the G-spot" by Ellen Bass

God and the G-Spot

“Carl never wanted to believe. He wanted to know.”
—Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s wife, on why he didn’t believe in God

I want to know too. Belief and disbelief
are a pair of tourists standing on swollen feet
in the Prado—I don’t like it.
I do.— before the Picasso.

Or the tattoo artist with a silver stud
in her full red executive lips,
who, as she inked in the indigo blue, said,
I think the G-spot’s one of those myths
men use to make us feel inferior.

God, the G-spot, falling in love. The earth round
and spinning, the galaxies speeding
in the glib flow of the Hubble expansion.
I’m an east coast Jew. We all have our opinions.

But it was in the cabin at La Selva Beach
where I gave her the thirty little red glass hearts
I’d taken back from my husband when I left.
He’d never believed in them. She, though, scooped
them up like water, let them drip through her fingers
like someone who has so much, she can afford to waste.

That’s the day she reached inside me
for something I didn’t think I had.
And like pulling a fat shining trout from the river
she pulled the river out of me. That’s
the way I want to know God.

Appeared in Mules of Love (Boa Editions, 2002)

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Photo Credit: Irene Young

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 five Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks (Doubleday, 1973) and is co-author of The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Woman Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (Harper & Rowe, 1988, 2008). Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review and many other magazines and journals. Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program and offers online Living Room Craft Talks at ellenbass.com.

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