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Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop

Sonnet (1979)

Caught —the bubble
in the spirit level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed —the broken
thermometer’s mercury
running away;
and the rainbow—bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!

(1979)

#Americans #PulitzerPrize #Women

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Beneath that loved and celebrated… silent, bored really blindly veine… grieves, maybe lives and lets live, passes bets, something moving but invisibly,
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I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn’t fight.
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Oh, but it is dirty! —this little filling station, oil—soaked, oil—permeated to a disturbing, over—all black translucency.
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We’d rather have the iceberg than… although it meant the end of trave… Although it stood stock—still like… and all the sea were moving marble… We’d rather have the iceberg than…
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Wasted, wasted minutes that couldn… minutes of a barbaric condescensio… —Stare out the bathroom window at… at their dark needles, accretions… woodenly crystallized, and where t…
At the Fishhouses

Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost in… a dark purple—brown,
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Think of the storm roaming the sky… like a dog looking for a place to… listen to it growling. Think how they must look now, the… lying out there unresponsive to th…
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Here is a coast; here is a harbor; here, after a meager diet of horiz… impractically shaped and—who knows… sad and harsh beneath their frivol… with a little church on top of one…
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He sleeps on the top of a mast with his eyes fast closed. The sails fall away below him like the sheets of his bed, leaving out in the air of the nigh…



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