Starlight, La Conga, all the dance-halls

  in the block of honkey-tonks,

  cavities in our waning moon,

  strung with bottles and blue lights

  and silvered coconuts and conches.

  As easily as the music falls,

  the nickels fall into the slots,

  the drinks like lonely water-falls

  in night descend the separate throats,

  and the hands fall on one another

  darker darkness under

  tablecloths & all descends,

  descends, falls,—much as we envision

  the helpless earthward fall of love

  descending from the head and eye

  down to the hands, and heart, and down.

  The music pretends to laugh and weep

  while it descends to drink and murder.

  The burning box can keep the measure

  strict, always, and the down-beat.

  Poe said that poetry was exact.

  But pleasures are mechanical

  and know beforehand what they want

  and know exactly what they want.

  & they obtain that single effect

  that can be calculated like alcohol

  or like the response to the nickel.

  —how long does the music burn?

  like poetry, or all your horror

  half as exact as horror here?

  1940s (Vassar 75.b, p. 239); published in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box.

  The Soldier and the Slot-Machine

  I will not play the slot-machine.

  Don’t force the nickel in my hand.

  I will not play the slot-machine

  For all the nickels in the land.

  I will not ask for change again.

  The barkeeper can see me dead

  Before I’ll try to meet those eyes

  That move like money in his head.

  The slot-machine is all embossed

  With horns of plenty done in gilt;

  And out of them all down its front

  Stream dummy coins supposedly spilt,

  Like medals for its cleverness,

  As if the slot-machine could cough

  In nickels down its tunic, but

  One cannot pick the dummies off.

  They are symbolic of the whole

  It seems to me, and I should know

  Since hundreds of times, thousands of times,

  I’ve added mine onto that row

  Moving along here in this groove

  Towards that hole they all fall through.

  The slot-machine is who is drunk

  And you’re a dirty nickel, too …

  Its notions all are preconceived.

  It tempts one much to tear apart

  The metal frame, to investigate

  The workings of its metal heart,

  The grindings of its metal brain,

  The bite of its decisive teeth.

  Oh yes, they decorate the top

  But not the awful underneath.

  The slot-machine is full of ——.

  The slot-machine’s materiel

  And if you squint your eyes it looks

  A little like a general.

  And even if generously inclined

  Its money all will melt, I’m sure,

  And flow like mercury through the cracks

  And make a pool beneath the floor …

  It should be flung into the sea.

  It should be broken up for junk

  And all its nickels taken away.

  The slot-machine is who is drunk.

  I will not play the slot-machine.

  Its pleasures I cannot afford.

  Whoever got the Twin Jack-Pot?

  Whoever won the Gold Award?

  c. 1942 (Vassar 64.7); published in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box. In line 46,

  “its” has been read for “it’s”.

  “I had a bad dream…”

  I had a bad dream,

  toward morning, about you.

  You lay unconscious

  It was to be

  for “24 hrs.”

  Wrapped in a long blanket

  I felt I must hold you

  even though a “load of guests”

  might come in from the garden

  /at/ a minute

  & see us lying

  with my arms around you

  & my cheek on yours.

  It was warm—but I had to

  prevent you

  from slipping away

  from your body your cheek

  from the wound-round blanket—

  grave dark morning

  Thinking of you

  a thousand miles away,

  how I tried to hold you

  with the numb arms of a dreamer

  in the deep of the morning

  the day coming

  that loneliness like falling on

  the sidewalk in a crowd

  that fills some slow, elaborate shame.

  the sidewalk rises rises

  like absolute despair

  n.d. (Vassar 75.3b, p. 167); published in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box. The word at the start of line 10 may be “at,” as in the phrase “at a minute’s notice.”

  The Owl’s Journey

  Somewhere the owl rode on the rabbit’s back

  down a long slope, over the long, dried grasses,

  through a half-moonlight igniting everything

  with specks of faintest green & blue.

  They made no sound, no shriek, no Whoo!

  —off on a long-forgotten journey.

  —The adventure’s miniature and ancient:

  collaboration thought up by a child.

  But they obliged, and off they went together.

  The owl’s claws lock deep in the rabbit’s fur,

  and the owl seated

  a little sideways, his mind on something else;

  the rabbit’s ears are back, his eyes intent.

  —But the dream has never got any further.

  c. 1949–50 (Vassar, 64.10); published in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box.

  A Short, Slow Life

  We lived in a pocket of Time.

  It was close, it was warm.

  Along the dark seam of the river

  the houses, the barns, the two churches,

  hid like white crumbs

  in a fluff of gray willows & elms,

  till Time made one of his gestures;

  his nails scratched the shingled roof.

  Roughly his hand reached in,

  and tumbled us out.

  1950s (Vassar 74.10); published in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box.

  Suicide of a Moderate Dictator

  for Carlos Lacerda

  This is a day when truths will out, perhaps;—

  leak from the dangling telephone ear-phones

  sapping the festooned switchboards’ strength;

  fall from the windows, blow from off the sills,

  —the vague, slight unremarkable contents

  of emptying ash-trays; rub off on our fingers

  like ink from the un-proof-read newspapers,

  crocking the way the unfocused photographs

  of crooked faces do that soil our coats,

  our tropical-weight coats, like slapped-at moths.

  Today’s a day when those who work

  are idling. Those who played must work

  and hurry, too, to get it done,

  with little dignity or none.

  The newspapers are sold; the kiosk shutters

  crash down. But anyway, in the night

  the headlines wrote themselves, see, on the streets

  and sidewalks everywhere; a sediment’s splashed

  even to the first floors of apartment houses.

  This is a day that’s beautiful as well,

  and warm and clear. At seven o’clock I saw

  the dogs being walked along the famous beach

  as usual, in a shiny gray-green dawn,

  leaving their paw-prints draining in the wet.

  The line of breakers was steady and the pinkish,

  segmented rainbow steadily hung above it.

  At eight two little boys were flying kites.

  c. 1954 or after, following the suicide of Getúlio Vargas on August 24, 1954

  (Vassar 67.14); published in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box.

  “Dear, my compass…”

  Dear, my compass

  still points north

  to wooden houses

  and blue eyes,

  fairy-tales where

  flaxen-headed

  younger sons

  bring home the goose,

  love in hay-lofts,

  Protestants, and

  heavy drinkers …

  Springs are backward,

  but crab-apples

  ripen to rubies,

  cranberries

  to drops of blood,

  and swans can paddle

  icy water,

  so hot the blood

  in those webbed feet.

  —Cold as it is, we’d

  go to bed, dear,

  early, but never

  to keep warm.

  c. 1965 (private collection; photograph courtesy of Carmen Oliveira, with thanks to Barbara Page and Lloyd Schwartz). A second, typed version organizes all the stanzas into quatrains, and was published in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box.

  A Drunkard

  When I was three, I watched the Salem fire.

  It burned all night (or then I thought it did)

  and I stood in my crib & watched it burn.

  The sky was bright red; everything was red:

  out on the lawn, my mother’s white dress looked

  rose-red; my white enammelled crib was red.

  and my hands holding to its rods—

  the brass knobs held specks of fire

  its brass knobs holding specks of fire—

  I felt amazement not fear

  but amazement may be

  my infancy’s main emotion—chief

  People were playing hoses on the roofs

  of the summer cottages in Marblehead on Marblehead neck

  the red sky was filled with flying moats,

  cinders and coals, and bigger things, scorched black burnt

  The water glowed like fire, too, but flat

  I watched some boats arriving on our beach

  full of escaping people (I didn’t know that)

  One dory, silhouetted black (and later I

  thought of this as having looked like

  Washington Crossing the Delaware, all black—

  in silhouette—

  I was terribly thirsty but mama didn’t hear

  me calling her. Out on the lawn

  she and some neighbors were giving coffee

  or food or something to the people landing in the boats—

  I glimpsed her once in a while I caught a glimpse of her

  and called and called—no one paid any attention—

  In the morning across the bay brilliant morning

  the fire still went on, but in the sunlight

  we saw no more glare, just the clouds of smoke

  The beach was strewn with cinders, dark with ash—

  strange objects seemed to have blown across the water

  lifted by that terrible heat, through the red sky?

  Blackened boards, shiny black like black feathers—

  pieces of furniture, parts of boats, and clothes—

  I picked up a woman’s long black cotton

  stocking. Curiosity. My mother said sharply

  Put that down! I remember clearly, clearly—

  But since that day, that reprimand

  that night that day that reprimand—

  I have had a suffered from abnormal thirst—

  I swear it’s true—and by the age

  of twenty or twenty-one I had begun

  to drink, & drink—I can’t get enough

  and, as you must have noticed,

  I’m half-drunk now …

  And all I’m telling you may be a lie …

  c. 1970–1971 (Vassar 64.22); published in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box.

  Spelling is corrected and words separated throughout.

  [Lines written in a copy of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book,

  given to Frank Bidart]

  You won’t become a gourmet* cook

  By studying our Fannie’s book—

  Her thoughts on Food & Keeping House

  Are scarcely those of Levi-Strauss.

  Nevertheless, you’ll find, Frank dear,

  The basic elements** are here.

  And if a problem should arise:

  The Soufflé fall before your eyes,

  Or strange things happen to the Rice

  —You know I love to give advice.

  Elizabeth

  Christmas, 1971

  P.S. Fannie should not be underrated;

  She has become sophisticated.

  She’s picked up many gourmet* tricks

  Since the edition of ’96.

  1971 (Houghton bMS Am 2036); published in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (1983), edited by Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess, and in The Complete

  Poems, 1927–1979. Schwartz asked Bishop’s permission to publish the inscription. She replied, “I suppose it is all right to print the Fanny Farmer dedication—but perhaps it shd. say, in ( )’s, A present to Frank Bidart—or else a longer title, a la Wordsworth— ‘Lines written in a copy of F F’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book, given to Frank Bidart’…?” (EB to Lloyd Schwartz, dated

  “August 23rd (I think) 1977,” Collection of Lloyd Schwartz.)

  Vague Poem ( Vaguely love poem)

  The trip west—

  —I think I dreamed that trip.

  They talked a lot of “Rose Rocks”

  or maybe “Rock Roses”

  —I’m not sure now, but someone tried to get me some.

  (And two or three students had.)

  She said she had some at her house.

  They were by the back door, she said.

  —A ramshackle house.

  An Army house ?—No, “a Navy house.” Yes,

  that far inland.

  There was nothing by the back door but dirt

  or that same dry monochrome, sepia straw I’d seen everywhere.

  Oh she said the dog has carried them off.

  (A big black dog, female, was dancing around us.)

  Later, as we drank tea from mugs, she found one,

  “a sort of one”. “This one is just beginning. See—

  you can see here, it’s beginning to look like a rose.

  It’s—well, a crystal, crystals form–

  I don’t know any geology myself…”

  (Neither did I.)

  Faintly, I could make out—perhaps—in the dull,

  rose-red lump of, apparently, soil,

  a rose-like shape; faint glitters … Yes, perhaps

  there was a secret, powerful crystal at work inside.

  I almost saw it: turning into a rose

  without any of the intervening

  roots, stem, buds, and so on; just

  earth to rose and back again.

  Crystalography and its laws:

  something I I once wanted badly to study,

  until I learned that it would involve a lot of arithmetic, that is, mathematics.

  Just now, when I saw you naked again,

  I thought the same words: rose-rock; rock-rose …

  Rose, trying, working to show itself,

  forming, folding over,

  unimaginable connections, unseen, shining edges.

  Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,

  clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,

  rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,

  exacting roses from the body,

  and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex—

  c. 1973? (Vassar, 67.23); published in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box.

  Breakfast Song

  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 & instant blue

  c. 1973–1974. Collection of Lloyd Schwartz; published in Edgar Allan Poe &

  The Juke-Box. The manuscript is in Lloyd Schwartz’s hand, copied from Bishop’s notebook on or around January 3, 1974. The notebook does not survive, but a surviving typescript draft of a poem entitled “Simple-Minded Morning Song,” consisting of two lines—“My love, my saving grace,/your eyes are very blue.”—is in Bishop’s papers (Vassar 64.24).

  For Grandfather

  How far north are you by now?

  —But I’m almost close enough to see you:

  under the North Star,

  stocky, broadbacked & determined,

  trudging on splaying snowshoes

  over the snow’s hard, brilliant, curdled crust …

  Aurora Borealis burns in silence.

  Streamers of red, of purple,

  fleck with color your bald head.

  Where is your sealskin cap with ear-lugs?

  That old fur coat with the black frogs?

  You’ll catch your death again.

  If I should overtake you, kiss your cheek,

  its silver stubble would feel like hoar-frost

  and your old-fashioned, walrus moustaches

  be hung with icicles.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19