Trunk, branches, leaves — sere and blemished — I am not what I wanted. Dignity is a hindrance. I am weighted with notions and unbalanced by fear. Night sweats, vapours. Why am I frightened alone on the street? Nothing’s here — a pair of brown squirrels — a few fallen apples — These rococco grimaces,…
I like almost imperceptibles, near still lifes — a limpet sloping full-tilt down a rock: thunder mooching among mountains, trailing delicate diminuendos: a mushroom hoisting a paving slab on its darning-egg head: and the brooch on her dress rising so quietly, so quietly falling. Don’t judge me by that: I like suddennesses too — fistfuls,…
— Wittgenstein, Tractatus The world is everything that is the case From the fly giving up in the coal-shed To the winged Victory of Samothrace. Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God Who hides, shame-facedly, His agèd face; Whose sun retires behind its veil of cloud. The world, though, is also so much more —…
We drive up the winding road lined by graying sycamores, a blessing in the summer heat. At a small table, between the stones, a man and two women nibble crustless sandwiches, pour from a silver pot of tea. They have their arrangements: dour frigidity of gladioli, faded dresses, a musty gentility. We have brought a…
I don’t want to shuffle in a Greek theatre chanting powerful platitudes while Nemesis, off stage, gouges and stabs. Or twangle a harp in an Irish castle while the drunken louts, the great heroes, quarrel over chess or lie with a snake-brained woman. I don’t want to be one of those who paused between the…
I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even wants the fly while writhing.
Everyone’s real world is a memory biscuit lodged somewhere in the spine or the ribs—a question of how one sits, when a strange kid is howling and you’re thinking: now my kid will be interested in the classics. Meanwhile, the biscuit dreams pulp of childhood and lumpy adolescence nudging its way to the table after…
Something small, like a new grassblade, or a word like love with the lies taken out of it, or a key that would unlock the doors I myself made. No hurricane, no revolution. Not even a small room where a sane scientist broods on the insanity he created. Something small, like a gesture as marvellous…
A memorial tribute read at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, 7 December 1979 My wife and I first met Elizabeth Bishop at the Eberharts' apartment in Cambridge, more than thirty years ago. She had just recently published her first book, North & South, which the reviewers had admired but which had also had…
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