Elizabeth Bishop

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like a disaster. 

Elizabeth Bishop

Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!
--this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color--
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO--SO--SO--SO

to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all. 

Elizabeth Bishop

Adrienne Rich

Diving Into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
We dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which our names do not appear.

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

 

 My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control.

A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

e.e. cummings

"kitty". sixteen, 5' 11", white, prostitute.

"kitty". sixteen, 5' 11", white, prostitute.

ducking always the touch of must and shall,
whose slippery body is Death's littlest pal,

skilled in quick softness. Unspontaneous. cute.

the signal perfume of whose unrepute
focusses in the sweet slow animal
bottomless eyes importantly banal,

Kitty. a whore. Sixteen
                                    you corking brute
amused from time to time by clever drolls
fearsomely who do keep their sunday flower.
The babybreasted broad "kitty" twice eight

--beer nothing, the lady'll have a whiskey-sour--

whose least amazing smile is the most great
common divisor of unequal souls.

2 little whos

2 little whos
(he and she)
under are this
wonderful tree

smiling stand
(all realms of where
and when beyond)
now and here

(far from a grown
-up i&you-
ful of world of known)
who and who

(2 little ams
and over them this
aflame with dreams
incredible is)


Buffalo Bill's


Buffalo Bill's
defunct
            who used to
            ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                     stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                               Jesus

he was a handsome man
                                      and what i want to know is
how do you like you blueeyed boy
Mister Death


r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r 


                            r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r  
                     who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
                  PPEGORHRASS
                                               eringint(o-
aThe):I
           eA
                !p:
S                                a
               (r
rIvInG             .gRrEaPsPhOs)
                                                 to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;

HD or Hilda Doolitte

Hilda Doolittle

Leda

Where the slow river 
meets the tide, 
a red swan lifts red wings 
and darker beak, 
and underneath the purple down 
of his soft breast 
uncurls his coral feet. 

Through the deep purple 
of the dying heat 
of sun and mist, 
the level ray of sun-beam 
has caressed 
the lily with dark breast, 
and flecked with richer gold 
its golden crest. 

Where the slow lifting 
of the tide, 
floats into the river 
and slowly drifts 
among the reeds, 
and lifts the yellow flags, 
he floats 
where tide and river meet. 

Ah kingly kiss -- 
no more regret 
nor old deep memories 
to mar the bliss; 
where the low sedge is thick, 
the gold day-lily 
outspreads and rests 
beneath soft fluttering 
of red swan wings 
and the warm quivering 
of the red swan's breast. 

Oread

Whirl up, sea— 
Whirl your pointed pines. 
Splash your great pines 
On our rocks. 
Hurl your green over us— 
Cover us with your pools of fir. 

Sea Rose

Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,

more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem—
you are caught in the drift.

Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.

Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?

From: The Walls Do Not Fall.

Too old to be useful
(whether in years of experience,

we are the same lot)
not old enough to be dead,

we are the keepers of the secret,
the carriers, the spinners

of the rare intangible thread
that binds all humanity

to ancient wisdom,
to antiquity;

our joy is unique, to us,
grape, knife, cup, wheat

are symbols in eternity,
and every concrete object

has abstract value, is timeless
in the dream parallel

whose relative sigil has not changed
since Nineveh and Babel.

Marianne Moore

Picking and Choosing

Literature is a phase of life. If
     one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if
one approaches it familiarly
     what one say of it is worthless. Words are constructive
when they are true; the opaque allusion–the simulated flight

upward–accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact
    that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment but is otherwise re-
warding; that James is all that has been
    said of him if feeling is profound? It is not Hardy
the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man

"interpreting life through the medium of the
    emotions." If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the
critic should know what he likes. Gordon
    Craig with "this is I" and "this is mine," with his three
wise men, his "sad French greens" and his Chinese cherry- Gordon Craig, so

inclinational and unashamed–has carried
   the precept of being a good critic to the last extreme, and Burke is a
psychologist–of acute, raccoon-
   like curiosity. Summa diligentia;
to the humbling, whose name is so amusing–very young and very

rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps "on the top of a
   diligence." We are not daft about the meaning, but this familiarity
with wrong meanings puzzles one. Humming-
   bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying

that you have a badger–remember Xenophon;
   only the most rudimentary sort of behavior is necessary
to put us on the scent; "a right good
   salvo of barks," a few "strong wrinkles" puckering the
skin between the ears, are all we ask.


A Grave

Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it
                                                                                                      yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,
but you cannot stand in the middle of this;
the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.
The films stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top,
reserved as their contours, saying nothing;
repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
There are others besides you who have worn that look–
whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them
for their bones have no lasted:
men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave,
and row quickly away–the blades of the oars
moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing
                                                                                                         as death.
The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx–beautiful under
                                                                                  networks of foam,
and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed;
the birds swim through the air top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore–
the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them;
and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell-buoys,
advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped
                                                                           things are about to sink–
in which if they turn and twist, it i neither with volition nor consciousness.

A Grave

Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it
                                                                                                      yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,
but you cannot stand in the middle of this;
the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.
The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top,
reserved as their contours, saying nothing;
repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
There are others besides you who have worn that look--
whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them
for their bones have not lasted:
men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave,
and row quickly away--the blades of the oars
moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing
                                                                                                         as death.
The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx--beautiful under
                                                                                   networks of foam,
and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed;
the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore--
the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them;
and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell-buoys,
advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped
                                                                        things are bound to sink--
in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.









Picking and Choosing

Literature is a phase of life: if
   one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if
one approaches it familiarly,
   what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive
when they are true; the opaque allusion–the simulated flight


upward–accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact
   that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment but is otherwise re
warding; that James is all that has been
   said of him but if feeling is profound? It is not Hardy
the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man


"interpreting life through the medium of the
emotions." If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the
critic should know what he likes. Gordon
Craig with his "this is I" and "this is mine," with his three
wise men, his"sad French greens" and his Chinese cherry–Gordon Craig, so

inclinational and unashamed has carried
   the precept of being a good critic, to the last extreme. And Burke is a
psychologist–of acute, raccoon-
   like curiosity. Summa diligentia; 
to the humbug, whose name is so amusing–very young and very                         
 
rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps on the "top of a
   diligence." We are not daft about the meaning, but this familiarity
with wrong meanings puzzles one. Humming-
   bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying


that you have a badger–remember Xenophon;
   only the most rudimentary sort of behaviour is necessary
to put us on the scent; a "right good
   salvo of barks," a few "strong wrinkles" puckering the
skin between the ears, are all we ask.