Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

Your village touched us by not knowing how.
Even as we outdrove its clear stormlight
A shower of self-belittling brilliants fell.
Miles later, hours away, here are rooms full
Of things you would have known: pump organ, hymnal,
Small-as-life desks, old farm tools, charter, deed,
Schoolbooks (Greek Grammar, A Canadian Reader),
Queen Mary in oleograph, a whole wall hung
With women’s black straw hats, some rather smart
—All circa 1915, like the manners
Of the fair, soft-spoken girl who shows us through.
Although till now she hasn’t heard of you
She knows these things you would have known by heart
And we, by knowing you by heart, foreknew.

The child whose mother had been put away
Might wake, climb to a window, feel the bay
Steel itself, bosom bared to the full moon,
Against the woebegone, cerebral Man;
Or by judicious squinting make noon's red
Monarch grappling foreground goldenrod
Seem to extract a further essence from
Houses it dwarfed. Grown-up, the visitor
Could find her North by the green velvet map
Appliquéd upon this wharfside shack,
Its shingles (in the time her back was turned)
Silver-stitched to visionary grain
As by a tireless, deeply troubled inmate,
Were Nature not by definition sane.

In living as in poetry, your art
Refused to tip the scale of being human
By adding unearned weight. “New, tender, quick”—
Nice watchwords; yet how often they invited
The anguish coming only now to light
In letters like photographs from Space, revealing
Your planet tremulously bright through veils
As swept, in fact, by inconceivable
Heat and turbulence—but there, I’ve done it,
Added the weight. What tribute could you bear
Without dismay? Well, facing where you lived
Somebody’s been inspired (can he have read
“Filling Station”?) to put pumps, a sign:
ESSO—what else! We filled up at the shrine.

Look, those were elms! Long vanished from our world.
Elms, by whose goblet stems distance itself
Taken between two fingers could be twirled,
Its bouquet breathed. The trees look cumbersome,
Sickly through mist, like old things on a shelf—
Astrolabes, pterodactyls. They must know.
The forest knows. Out from such melting backdrops
It’s the rare conifer stands whole, one sharp
Uniquely tufted spoke of a dark snow crystal
Not breathed upon, as yet, by our exhaust.
Part of a scene that with its views and warblers,
And at its own grave pace, but in your footsteps
—Never more imminent the brink, more sheer—
Is making up its mind to disappear

…With many a dirty look. That waterfall
For instance, beating itself to grit-veined cream
“Like Roquefort through a grater”? Or the car—!
So here we sit in the car wash, snug and dry
As the pent-up fury of the storm hits: streaming,
Foaming “emotions”—impersonal, cathartic,
Closer to both art and what we are
Than the gush of nothings one outpours to people
On the correspondence side of bay and steeple
Whose dazzling whites we’ll never see again,
Or failed to see in the first place. Still, as the last
Suds glide, slow protozoa, down the pane,
We’re off—Excuse our dust! With warm regards,—
Gathering phrases for tomorrow’s cards.