Elizabeth Bishop - Tumblr Posts

23.12.23

“Lose something every day. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. / The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

Here’s to an overdue post-exam update, accompanied by a photo from my last day on campus. I’m home for the break with a growing list of things I’d like to get done (while I try not to speculate about grades). My immune system has unfortunately mandated some rest, but I’ll figure things out when I’m better.

“It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” —Elizabeth Bishop

I’m sure there is a word. (in English there is always a word). there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.

suppose I were to begin by saying I had fallen in love with a boy. would things be easier if there was a right way?

“I can’t be there” is all you had to say. you can’t take me for granted and smile. there is less time for more things that i need to say. you must change your life: I mean we never behave as if we believed we were going to die.

goodbye to love, to the possibilities, to the shattered majesty: the head may err, but never the blood.

(like the breeze that blows in June, I will steady keep you cool—this, I swear with all that’s true. I’ll taking nothing in place of you.)

(trees and seas have flown away, I call it loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you, a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all, and free of any eden we can name

“The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop (born on this day in 1911)

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. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen - the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly- I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. - It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip - if you could call it a lip grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels- until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.