Elizabeth Bishop

This is the house of Bedlam. This is the man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is the time of the tragic man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a wristwatch telling the time of the talkative man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a sailor wearing the watch that tells the time of the honored man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is the roadstead all of board reached by the sailor wearing the watch that tells the time of the old, brave man that lies in the house of Bedlam. These are the years and the walls of the ward, the winds and clouds of the sea of board sailed by the sailor wearing the watch that tells the time of the cranky man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances weeping down the ward over the creaking sea of board beyond the sailor winding his watch that tells the time of the cruel man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a world of books gone flat. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances weeping down the ward over the creaking sea of board of the batty sailor that winds his watch that tells the time of the busy man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a boy that pats the floor to see if the world is there, is flat, for the widowed Jew in the newspaper hat that dances weeping down the ward waltzing the length of a weaving board by the silent sailor that hears his watch that ticks the time of the tedious man that lies in the house of Bedlam. These are the years and the walls and the door that shut on a boy that pats the floor to feel if the world is there and flat. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances joyfully down the ward into the parting seas of board past the staring sailor that shakes his watch that tells the time of the poet, the man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is the soldier home from the war. These are the years and the walls and the door that shut on a boy that pats the floor to see if the world is round or flat. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances carefully down the ward, walking the plank of a coffin board with the crazy sailor that shows his watch that tells the time of the wretched man that lies in the house of Bedlam.

At four o’clock in the gun-metal blue dark we hear the first crow of the first cock just below the gun-metal blue window and immediately there is an echo off in the distance, then one from the backyard fence, then one, with horrible insistence, grates like a wet match from the broccoli patch, flares, and all over town begins to catch. Cries galore come from the water-closet door, from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor, where in the blue blur their rustling wives admire, the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare with stupid eyes while from their beaks there rise the uncontrolled, traditional cries. Deep from protruding chests in green-gold medals dressed, planned to command and terrorize the rest, the many wives who lead hens’ lives of being courted and despised; deep from raw throats a senseless order floats all over town. A rooster gloats over our beds from rusty iron sheds and fences made from old bedsteads, over our churches where the tin rooster perches, over our little wooden northern houses, making sallies from all the muddy alleys, marking out maps like Rand McNally’s: glass-headed pins, oil-golds and copper greens, anthracite blues, alizarins, each one an active displacement in perspective; each screaming, “This is where I live!” Each screaming “Get up! Stop dreaming!” Roosters, what are you projecting? You, whom the Greeks elected to shoot at on a post, who struggled when sacrificed, you whom they labeled “Very combative ...” what right have you to give commands and tell us how to live, cry “Here!” and “Here!” and wake us here where are unwanted love, conceit and war? The crown of red set on your little head is charged with all your fighting blood. Yes, that excrescence makes a most virile presence, plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence. Now in mid-air by twos they fight each other. Down comes a first flame-feather, and one is flying, with raging heroism defying even the sensation of dying. And one has fallen, but still above the town his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down; and what he sung no matter. He is flung on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung with his dead wives with open, bloody eyes, while those metallic feathers oxidize. St. Peter’s sin was worse than that of Magdalen whose sin was of the flesh alone; of spirit, Peter’s, falling, beneath the flares, among the “servants and officers.” Old holy sculpture could set it all together in one small scene, past and future: Christ stands amazed, Peter, two fingers raised to surprised lips, both as if dazed. But in between a little cock is seen carved on a dim column in the travertine, explained by gallus canit; flet Petrus underneath it. There is inescapable hope, the pivot; yes, and there Peter’s tears run down our chanticleer’s sides and gem his spurs. Tear-encrusted thick as a medieval relic he waits. Poor Peter, heart-sick, still cannot guess those cock-a-doodles yet might bless, his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness, a new weathervane on basilica and barn, and that outside the Lateran there would always be a bronze cock on a porphyry pillar so the people and the Pope might see that even the Prince of the Apostles long since had been forgiven, and to convince all the assembly that “Deny deny deny” is not all the roosters cry. In the morning a low light is floating in the backyard, and gilding from underneath the broccoli, leaf by leaf; how could the night have come to grief? gilding the tiny floating swallow’s belly and lines of pink cloud in the sky, the day’s preamble like wandering lines in marble. The cocks are now almost inaudible. The sun climbs in, following “to see the end,” faithful as enemy, or friend.

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 disaster.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations For Grace Bulmer Bowers Grace Bulmer Bowers Elizabeth Bishop’s aunt From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay coming in, the bay not at home; where, silted red, sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea, and others, veins veins Used as a verb: to extend over or mark with lines, as in the manner of veins the flats’ lavender, rich mud in burning rivulets rivulets A small stream or brook ; on red, gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat, clapboard churches, bleached, ridged as clamshells, past twin silver birches, through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue, beat-up enamel; down hollows, up rises, and waits, patient, while a lone traveller gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and a collie supervises. Goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer; the fog, shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold, round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hens’ feathers, in gray glazed cabbages, on the cabbage roses and lupins lupins A tall, flowering plant (Lupinus) in the legume family; its seeds (lupin beans) have been used as food like apostles apostles A plant native to Brazil with large, fragrant white and purple flowers ; the sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences; bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves foxgloves A colorful perennial flower, with cup-shaped buds. , and evening commences. One stop at Bass River Bass River All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy . Then the Economies Economies Locations (Lower Economy, Middle Economy, and Upper Economy) in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy — Lower, Middle, Upper; Five Islands Five Islands All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy , Five Houses Five Houses All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy , where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering. Gone. The Tantramar marshes Tantramar marshes On the Chignecto Isthmus connecting Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn’t give way. On the left, a red light swims through the dark: a ship’s port lantern. Two rubber boots show, illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags, brisk, freckled, elderly. “A grand night. Yes, sir, all the way to Boston.” She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods, hairy, scratchy, splintery; moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb’s wool on bushes in a pasture. The passengers lie back. Snores. Some long sighs. A dreamy divagation divagations Wanderings begins in the night, a gentle, auditory, slow hallucination.... In the creakings and noises, an old conversation —not concerning us, but recognizable, somewhere, back in the bus: Grandparents’ voices uninterruptedly talking, in Eternity: names being mentioned, things cleared up finally; what he said, what she said, who got pensioned pensioned Dismissed from employment, typically because of age or health; paid a pension. ; deaths, deaths and sicknesses; the year he remarried; the year (something) happened. She died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered schooner foundered A ship that has sunk or filled with water . He took to drink. Yes. She went to the bad. When Amos began to pray even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. “Yes ...” that peculiar affirmative. “Yes ...” A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, that means “Life’s like that. We know it(also death).” Talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully, on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now, it’s all right now even to fall asleep just as on all those nights. —Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather, in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at the bus’s hot hood. Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses safe as houses Totally safe ). A man’s voice assures us “Perfectly harmless....” Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, “Sure are big creatures.” “It’s awful plain.” “Look! It’s a she!” Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy? “Curious creatures,” says our quiet driver, rolling his r’s. “Look at that, would you.” Then he shifts gears. For a moment longer, by craning backward, the moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam macadam Road, pavement ; then there’s a dim smell of moose, an acrid acrid Pungent, irritating smell of gasoline.

Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.” Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat. It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon. He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers. But when the Man-Moth pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface, the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings. He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection. He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb. Up the façades, his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head through that round clean opening and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light. (Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.) But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. Then he returns to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits, he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly. The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards. Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams. Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window, for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers. If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

for Thomas Edwards Wanning Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily like a dog looking for a place to sleep in, listen to it growling. Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys lying out there unresponsive to the lightning in dark, coarse-fibred families, where occasionally a heron may undo his head, shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment when the surrounding water shines. Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons. It is raining there. The boulevard and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened. Now the storm goes away again in a series of small, badly lit battle-scenes, each in "Another part of the field." Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge; think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.

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.

A new volcano has erupted, the papers say, and last week I was reading where some ship saw an island being born: at first a breath of steam, ten miles away; and then a black fleck—basalt, probably— rose in the mate’s binoculars and caught on the horizon like a fly. They named it. But my poor old island’s still un-rediscovered, un-renamable. None of the books has ever got it right. Well, I had fifty-two miserable, small volcanoes I could climb with a few slithery strides— volcanoes dead as ash heaps. I used to sit on the edge of the highest one and count the others standing up, naked and leaden, with their heads blown off. I’d think that if they were the size I thought volcanoes should be, then I had become a giant; and if I had become a giant, I couldn’t bear to think what size the goats and turtles were, or the gulls, or the overlapping rollers —a glittering hexagon of rollers closing and closing in, but never quite, glittering and glittering, though the sky was mostly overcast. My island seemed to be a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere’s left-over clouds arrived and hung above the craters—their parched throats were hot to touch. Was that why it rained so much? And why sometimes the whole place hissed? The turtles lumbered by, high-domed, hissing like teakettles. (And I’d have given years, or taken a few, for any sort of kettle, of course.) The folds of lava, running out to sea, would hiss. I’d turn. And then they’d prove to be more turtles. The beaches were all lava, variegated, black, red, and white, and gray; the marbled colors made a fine display. And I had waterspouts. Oh, half a dozen at a time, far out, they’d come and go, advancing and retreating, their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches of scuffed-up white. Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated, sacerdotal beings of glass ... I watched the water spiral up in them like smoke. Beautiful, yes, but not much company. I often gave way to self-pity. “Do I deserve this? I suppose I must. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Was there a moment when I actually chose this? I don’t remember, but there could have been.” What’s wrong about self-pity, anyway? With my legs dangling down familiarly over a crater’s edge, I told myself “Pity should begin at home.” So the more pity I felt, the more I felt at home. The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun rose from the sea, and there was one of it and one of me. The island had one kind of everything: one tree snail, a bright violet-blue with a thin shell, crept over everything, over the one variety of tree, a sooty, scrub affair. Snail shells lay under these in drifts and, at a distance, you’d swear that they were beds of irises. There was one kind of berry, a dark red. I tried it, one by one, and hours apart. Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects; and so I made home-brew. I’d drink the awful, fizzy, stinging stuff that went straight to my head and play my home-made flute (I think it had the weirdest scale on earth) and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats. Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all? I felt a deep affection for the smallest of my island industries. No, not exactly, since the smallest was a miserable philosophy. Because I didn’t know enough. Why didn’t I know enough of something? Greek drama or astronomy? The books I’d read were full of blanks; the poems—well, I tried reciting to my iris-beds, “They flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss ...” The bliss of what? One of the first things that I did when I got back was look it up. The island smelled of goat and guano. The goats were white, so were the gulls, and both too tame, or else they thought I was a goat, too, or a gull. Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek, baa ... shriek ...

Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water. The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail, with small iridescent flies crawling on them. Up on the little slope behind the houses, set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, is an ancient wooden capstan, cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, where the ironwork has rusted. The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population and of codfish and herring while he waits for a herring boat to come in. There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, the blade of which is almost worn away. Down at the water’s edge, at the place where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp descending into the water, thin silver tree trunks are laid horizontally across the gray stones, down and down at intervals of four or five feet. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin. Bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Here is a coast; here is a harbor; here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery; impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains, sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery, with a little church on top of one. And warehouses, some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue, and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist, is this how this country is going to answer you and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last, and immediately, after eighteen days of suspension? Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming, a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brillant rag. So that's the flag. I never saw it before. I somehow never thought of there being a flag, but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume, and paper money; they remain to be seen. And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward, myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen, descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters waiting to be loaded with green coffee beans. Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook! Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy, a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall, with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression. Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall s, New York. There. We are settled. The customs officials will speak English, we hope, and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes. Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impression they make, or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter, the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps— wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter do when we mail the letteres we wrote on the boat, either because the glue here is very inferior or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once; we are driving to the interior. January 1952