Poems by Elizabeth Bishop


The Fish
 
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.
 
 
Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
 
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
 
—Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.
 
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,
 
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst. 

The Imaginary Iceberg

We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship, 
although it meant the end of travel. 
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock 
and all the sea were moving marble. 
We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship; 
we'd rather own this breathing plain of snow 
though the ship's sails were laid upon the sea 
as the snow lies undissolved upon the water. 
O solemn, floating field, 
are you aware an iceberg takes repose 
with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows? 
 
This is a scene a sailor'd give his eyes for. 
The ship's ignored. The iceberg rises 
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles 
correct elliptics in the sky. 
This is a scene where he who treads the boards 
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain 
is light enough to rise on finest ropes 
that airy twists of snow provide. 
The wits of these white peaks 
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares 
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares. 

 
The iceberg cuts its facets from within. 
Like jewelry from a grave 
it saves itself perpetually and adorns 
only itself, perhaps the snows 
which so surprise us lying on the sea. 
Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off 
where waves give in to one another's waves 
and clouds run in a warmer sky. 
Icebergs behoove the soul 
(both being self-made from elements least visible) 
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible. 

Giant Snail

The rain has stopped. The waterfall will roar like that all night. I have come out to take a walk and feed. My body—foot, that is—is wet and cold and covered with sharp gravel. It is white, the size of a dinner plate. I have set myself a goal, a certain rock, but it may well be dawn before I get there. Although I move ghostlike and my floating edges barely graze the ground, I am heavy, heavy, heavy. My white muscles are already tired. I give the impression of mysterious ease, but it is only with the greatest effort of my will that I can rise above the smallest stones and sticks. And I must not let myself be distracted by those rough spears of grass. Don't touch them. Draw back. Withdrawal is always best.

The rain has stopped. The waterfall makes such a noise! (And what if I fall over it?) The mountains of black rock give off such clouds of steam! Shiny streamers are hanging down their sides. When this occurs, we have a saying that the Snail Gods have come down in haste. I could never descend such steep escarpments, much less dream of climbing them.

That toad was too big, too, like me. His eyes beseeched my love. Our proportions horrify our neighbors.

Rest a minute; relax. Flattened to the ground, my body is like a pallid, decomposing leaf. What's that tapping on my shell? Nothing. Let's go on.

My sides move in rhythmic waves, just off the ground, from front to back, the wake of a ship, wax-white water, or a slowly melting floe. I am cold, cold, cold as ice. My blind, white bull's head was a Cretan scare-head; degenerate, my four horns that can't attack. The sides of my mouth are now my hands. They press the earth and suck it hard. Ah, but I know my shell is beautiful, and high, and glazed, and shining. I know it well, although I have not seen it. Its curled white lip is of the finest enamel. Inside, it is as smooth as silk, and I, I fill it to perfection.

My wide wake shines, now it is growing dark. I leave a lovely opalescent ribbon: I know this.

But O! I am too big. I feel it. Pity me.

If and when I reach the rock, I shall go into a certain crack there for the night. The waterfall below will vibrate through my shell and body all night long. In that steady pulsing I can rest. All night I shall be like a sleeping ear.

 
Giant Toad

I am too big. Too big by far. Pity me. 

My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even so. They see too much, above, 
below. And yet, there is not much to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on 
my skin in drops. The drops run down down my sides and drip beneath my belly. Perhaps 
the droplets on my mottled hide are pretty, like dewdrops, silver on a moldering leaf? 
They chill me through and through. I feel my colors changing now, my pigments gradually 
shudder and shift over. 

Now I shall get beneath that overhanging ledge. Slowly. Hop. Two or three times more, 
silently. That was too far. I'm standing up. The lichen's gray, and rough to my front feet. 
Get down. Turn facing out, it's safer. Don't breathe until the snail gets by. But we go 
travelling the same weathers. Swallow the air and mouthfuls of cold mist. Give voice, just once. O how it echoed from 
the rock! What a profound, angelic bell I rang! 

I live, I breathe, by swallowing. Once, some naughty children picked me up, me and 
two brothers. They set us down again somewhere and in our mouths they put lit cigarettes. 
We could not help but smoke them, to the end. I thought it was the death of me, but when 
I was entirely filled with smoke, when my slack mouth was burning, and all my tripes 
were and dry, they let us go. But I was sick for days. 

I have big shoulders, like a boxer. They are not muscle, however, and their color is dark. 
They are my sacs of poison, the almost unused poison that I bear, my burden and my 
great responsibility. Big wings of poison, folded on my back. Beware, I am an angel 
in disguise; my wings are evil, but not deadly. If I will it, the poison could break through, 
blue-black,and dangerous to all. Blue-black fumes would rise upon the air. Beware, 
you frivolous crab. 

12 O'Clock News

gooseneck lamp	As you all know, tonight is the night of the full moon, half the world over. But here the moon seems to hang motionless in the sky. It gives very little light; it could be dead. Visibility is poor. Nevertheless, we shall try to give you some idea of the lay of the land and the present situation.
typewriter	The escapement that rises abruptly from the central plain is in heavy shadow, but the elaborate terrac- ing of its southern glacis gleams faintly in the dim light, like fish scales. What endless labor those small, peculiarly shaped terraces represent! And yet, on them the welfare of this tiny principality depends.
pile of mss.	A slight landslide occurred in the northwest about an hour ago. The exposed soil appears to be of poor quality: almost white, calcareous, and shaly. There are believed to have been no casualties.
typed sheet	Almost due north, our aerial reconnaissance reports the discovery of a large rectangular ‘field’, hitherto unknown to us, obviously man-made. It is dark- speckled. An airstrip? A cemetery?
envelopes	In this small, backward country, one of the most backward left in the world today, communications are crude and “industrialization” and its products almost nonexistent. Strange to say, however, sign- boards are on a truly gigantic scale.
ink-bottle	We have also received reports of a mysterious, oddly shaped, black structure, at an undisclosed distance to the east. Its presence was revealed only because its highly polished surface catches such feeble moonlight as prevails. The natural resources of the country being far from completely known to us, there is the possibility that this may be, or may contain, some powerful and terrifying “secret weapon”. On the other hand, given what we do know, or have learned from our anthropologists and sociologists about this people, it may well be nothing more than a numen, or a great altar recently erected to one of their gods, to which, in their present historical state of superstition and helplessness, they attribute magical power, and may even regard as a “savior,” one last hope of rescue from their grave difficulties.
typewriter eraser	At last! One of the elusive natives has been spotted! He appears to be—rather, to have been—a unicyclist-courier, who may have met his end by falling from the height of the escarpment because of the deceptive illumination. Alive, he would have been small, but undoubtedly proud and erect, with the thick, bristling black hair typical of the indigenes.
ashtray	From our superior vantage point, we can clearly see into a sort of dugout, possibly a shell crater, a “nest” of soldiers. They lie heaped together, wearing the camouflage “battle dress” intended for “winter war- fare”. They are in hideously contorted position, all dead. We can make out at least eight bodies. These uniforms were designed to be used in guerilla warfare on the country's one snow-covered moun- tain peak. The fact that these poor soldiers are wearing them here, on the plain, gives further proof, if proof were necessary, either of the childish- ness and hopeless impracticality of this inscrutable people, our opponents, or of the sad corruption of their leaders.

The Map
 
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?
 
The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
—the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.
 
Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves' own conformation:
and Norway's hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
—What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors. 

The Man-Moth

Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth."
 
 Here, above,
cracks in the buldings 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 records 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.

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