Elizabeth Bishop, 1911-1979
poems from A Cold Spring, 1955
poems from Questions of Travel, 1965
from North and South, 1946
The Map Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long sea-weed ledges where weeds hang to the simple blue from green. Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under, drawing it unperturbed around itself? Along the fine tan sandy shelf is the land tugging at the sea from under? The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still. Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays, under a glass as if they were expected to blossom, or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish. The names of seashore towns run out to sea, the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains - the printer here experiencing the same excitement as when emotion too far exceeds it cause. These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods. Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is, lending the land their waves' own conformation: and Norway's hare runs south in agitation, profiles inestigate teh sea, where land is. Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors? - What suits the character or the native waters best. Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors. Love Lies Sleeping Earliest morning, switching all the tracks that cross the sky from cinder star to star, coupling the ends of streets to trains of light. now draw us into daylight in our beds; and clear away what presses on the brain: put out the neon shapes that float and swell and glare down the gray avenue between the eyes in pinks and yellows, letters and twitching signs. Hang-over moons, wane, wane! From the window I see an immense city, carefully revealed, made delicate by over-workmanship, detail upon detail, cornice upon facade, reaching up so languidly up into a weak white sky, it seems to waver there. (Where it has slowly grown in skies of water-glass from fused beads of iron and copper crystals, the little chemical "garden" in a jar trembles and stands again, pale blue, blue-green, and brick.) The sparrows hurriedly begin their play. Then, in the West, "Boom!" and a cloud of smoke. "Boom!" and the exploding ball of blossom blooms again. (And all the employees who work in a plants where such a sound says "Danger," or once said "Death," turn in their sleep and feel the short hairs bristling on backs of necks.) The cloud of smoke moves off. A shirt is taken of a threadlike clothes-line. Along the street below the water-wagon comes throwing its hissing, snowy fan across peelings and newspapers. The water dries light-dry, dark-wet, the pattern of the cool watermelon. I hear the day-springs of the morning strike from stony walls and halls and iron beds, scattered or grouped cascades, alarms for the expected: queer cupids of all persons getting up, whose evening meal they will prepare all day, you will dine well on his heart, on his, and his, so send them about your business affectionately, dragging in the streets their unique loves. Scourge them with roses only, be light as helium, for always to one, or several, morning comes whose head has fallen over the edge of his bed, whose face is turned so that the image of the city grows down into his open eyes inverted and distorted. No. I mean distorted and revealed, if he sees it at all. The Weed I dreamed that dead, and meditating, I lay upon a grave, or bed, (at least, some cold and close-built bower). In the cold heart, its final thought stood frozen, drawn immense and clear, stiff and idle as I was there; and we remained unchanged together for a year, a minute, an hour. Suddenly there was a motion, as startling, there, to every sense as an explosion. Then it dropped to insisten, cautious creeping in the region of the heart, prodding e from desperate sleep. I raised my head. A slight young weed had pushed up through the heart adn its green head was nodding on the breast. (All this was in the dark.) It grew an inch like a blade of grass; next, one leaf shot out of its side a twisting, waving flag, and then two leaves moved like a semaphore. The stem grew thick. The nervous roots reached to each side; the graceful head changed its position mysteriously, since there was neither sun nor moon to catch its young attention. The rooted heart began to change (not beat) and then it split apart and from it roke a flood of water. Two rivers glanced off from the sides, one to the right, one to the left, two rushing, half-clear streams, (the ribs made of them two cascades) which assuredly, smooth as glass, went off through the fine black grains o fearth. The weed was almost swept away; it struggled with its leaves, lifting them fringed with heavy drops. A few drops fell upon my face and in my eyes, so I could see (or, in that black place, thought I saw) that each drop contained a light, a small, illuminated scene; the weed-deflected stream was made itself of racing images. (As if a river should carry all the scenes that it had once reflected shut in its waters, and not floating on momentary surfaces.) The weed stood in the severed heart. "What are you doing there?" I asked. It lifted its head all dripping wet (with my own thoughts?) and answered then: "I grow," it said, "but to divide your heart again." The Unbeliever He sleeps on the top of a mast. - Bunyan He sleeps on the top of a mast with his eyes fast closed. The sails fall away below him like the sheets of his bed, leaving out in the air of the night the sleeper's head. Asleep he was transported there, asleep he curled in a gilded ball on the mast's top, or climbed inside a gilded bird, or blindly seated himself astride. "I am founded on marble pillars," said a cloud. "I never move. See the pillars there in the sea?" Secure in introspection he peers at the watery pillars of his reflection. A gull had wings under his and remarked that the air was "like marble." He said: "Up here I tower through the sky for the marble wings on my tower-top fly." But he sleeps on teh top of his mast with his eyes closed tight. The gull inquired into his dream, which was, "I must not fall. The spangled sea below wants me to fall. It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all." The Monument Now can you see the monument? It is of wood built somewhat like a box. No. Built like several boxes in descending sizes one above the other. Each is turned half-way round so that its corners point toward the sides of the one below and the angles alternate. Then on the topmost cube is set a sort of fleur-de-lys of weathered wood, long petals of board, pierced with odd holes, four-sided, stiff, ecclesiastical. From it four thin, warped poles spring out, (slanted like fishing-poles or flag-poles) and from them jig-saw work hangs down, four lines of vaguely whittled ornament over the edges of the boxes to the ground. The monument is one-third set against a sea; two-thirds against a sky. The view is geared (that is, the view's perspective) so low there is no "far away," and we are far away within the view. A sea of narrow, horizontal boards lies out behin our lonely monument, its long grains alternating right and left like floor-boards - spotted, swarming-still, and motionless. A sky runs parallel, and it is palings, coarser than the sea's: splintery sunlight and long-fibred clouds. "Why does the strange sea make no sound? Is it because we're far away? Where are we? Are we in Asia Minor, or in Mongolia?" An ancient promontory, an ancient principality whose artist-prince might have wanted to build a monument to mark a tomb or boundary, or make a melancholy or romantic scene of it... "But that queer sea looks made of wood, half-shining, like a driftwood, sea. And the sky looks wooden, grained with cloud. It's like a stage-set; it is all so flat! Those clouds are full of glistening splinters! What is that?" It is the monument. "It's piled-up boxes, outlined with shoddy fret-work, half-fallen off, cracked and unpainted. It looks old." - The strong sunlight, the wind from the sea, all the conditions of its existence, may have flaked off the paint, if ever it was painted, and made it homelier than it was. "Why did you bring me here to see it? A temple of crates in cramped and crated scenerey, what can it prove? I am tired of breathing this eroded air, this dryness in which the monument is cracking." It is an artifact of wood. Wood holds together better than sea or cloud or and could by itself, much better than real sea or sand or cloud. It chose that way to grow and not to move. The monument's an object, yet those decorations, carelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all, give it away as having life, adn wishing; wanting to be a monument, to cherish something. The crudest scroll-work says "commemorate," while once each day the light goes around it like a prowling animal, or the rain falls on it, or the wind blows into it. It may be solid, may be hollow. The bones of the artist-pring may be inside or far away on even drier soil. But roughly but adequately it can shelfter waht is within (which after all cannot have been intended to be seen). It is the beginning of a painting, a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument, and all of wood. Watch it closely. The Fish I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strps like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was specled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gils were breathing in the terrible oxygen - the frighttening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly- I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far largers than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. -It was more like the tipping of an object toward teh light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip - if you could call it a lip - grim, wet, adn weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, of four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firsmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from teh strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow aroudn the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, teh sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels - until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.