Song

Elizabeth Bishop (1937)

Summer is over upon the sea.
The pleasure yacht, the social being,
That danced on the endless polished floor,
Stepped and side-stepped like Fred Astaire,
Is gone, is gone, docked somewhere ashore.

The friends have left, the sea is bare
That was strewn with floating, fresh green weeds.
Only the rusty-sided freighter
Goes past the moon's marketless craters
And the stars are the only ships of pleasure.

The Imaginary Iceberg

Elizabeth Bishop (b. 1911)

We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship
Although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock still like cloudy rock
And all the sea were moving marble.

We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship;
We'd rather own this breathing plain of snow
Though the ship's sail were laid upon the sea
As the snow lies undissolved upon the water.
O solemn, floating field,
Are you aware an iceberg takes repose
With you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?

This is a scene a sailor'd give his eyes for.
The ship's ignored. The iceberg rises
And sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
Correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
Is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
Is light enough to rise on finest ropes
That airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
Spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
Upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.

This iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
It saves itself perpetually and adorns
Only itself, perhaps the snows
Which so surprise us lying on the sea.
Goodbye, we say, goodbye, the ship steers off
Where waves give in to one another's waves
And clouds run in a warmer sky.
Icebergs behoove the soul
(Both being self-made from elements least visible)
To see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.

Breakfast Song

Elizabeth Bishop (1973)

My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold, filthy place,
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I've grown accustomed to?
—Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie!
But no, I know it's true.
It's just the common case;
There's nothing one can do,
My love, my saving grace.
Your eyes are awfully blue
early and instant blue.

After the Rain

Elizabeth Bishop (Key West, 1942)

After the rain the puddles are blue.
As St. Theresa said of Grace:
"There are little pools for children,
there are pools for all,
some large, some small."

The school-house in its gritty playground,
built of cement-blocks, stained with rain,
is turreted, and crenallated,
a two-dimensional
cardboard castle

where little captives, like fair ladies
mirror-charmed, gaze into blackboards.

It Is Marvelous . . .

Elizabeth Bishop (1989)

It is marvelous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvelous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light of falling kisses.

An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one's back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

One Art

Elizabeth Bishop (1976)

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 hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

2008: Hum by Ann Lauterbach