One Art by Elisabeth Bishop

    

                            

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.

I really can't explain why I like this poem so much, ( I like almost anything by Elisabeth Bishop) , I am aware of being simply enchanted by the both drunk and sober rhythm and rhymes. In stanzas and lines that seem to have sprung with a force of their own powerful like an undefeated dance.

THIS BLACKBIRD BEHIND THE SHADES

that always sings while the day fades.

Both here and far way.

Receding at a point, like waves.

While the evening expands

and the strand

surrenders to the low tide.

Like memory’s fingers

that linger.

Listen, silence.

Listen, it has started again.

A lapse is a friend.

Sky’s reservoir.

Far, never too far.

BIRDS' PICS

 

A woodpecker

pecking at my shutter,

a hole in the matter.

 

While the swan

flies away with the girl,

sky’s sweeping swirl.

 

“Quick, quick, follow them”,

between a wave and another of the sea,

just a flap between darkness and me.

 

“With a hollow rumble of wings”,

a conscience-stinging dart
swallowing the heart.

 

“Fly away”, you say, now my turn:

can you gaze up at the sky

while your bones burn?

THE POPPIES

It’s middle May and they

are on time, along the railway line

and in the fields, earth’s skin

letting out its drops of blood,

waving and wavering,

a light, grateful swarming load.

Their petals, blood-lit, flimsy souls,

seem to have alighted by chance,

a god scattering the crimson dots

of his countenance in advance.

They are drunk with the veins of the sun,

fingered by any infinitesimal breath,

clustering in the heat of the railroad tracks,

crowding the shiny sides of the iron lines,

they chatter and applaud, just slightly torn

when our wheels flash and swarm.

They do not last much but, unlike blood,

they do not dry and fade like memory’s trade

but they shuffle off, are shaken away

by the windy breath of one more day.

 

And these words, so easily reddening

can’t but imitate their enthusiasm

conscious to be, like anything,

just bubbles of a wave in a chasm.

Kate Atkinson

I have read almost all her novels, the right adjective for this latest one is sparkling. Each sentence, each word sparkles, falls instantly perfectly into place. The title: Life After Life.
Has a narration, each word of it, a taste? Beyond metaphor, it has.

LICKING

I could highlight

ice-cream in late afternoon

sliding into a luminous

evening on the waterfront.

On Sundays. Eyeing people

strolling, chatter unrolling,

all that streaming over there.

Longing for staying

in the trust of a stare.

In the ever present

days gone by, the sun shining,

unreached and unreserved.

Licking, from mouth to mind,

settling each lick in the heart.

Sensing we could lick

all the way to the bone,

like through a flowers’ persistence

from stone to stone.

 

Like my licking master,

my dog under the table

now licking my bare feet

making me feel fully

earth to earth on my seat,

on the waves of this stage, still

and faring forward in spring heat.

BERIBBONED

 

Words come, like this

and you simply enjoy their taste even if

you are not really sure of what they mean.

And do not find them in the dictionary.

Beloved ghosts, beloved ribbons.

They give you an image, almost

for the hell of it, almost

shrugging their shoulders,

through the enduring

babbling bubbles of syllables.

Then the image can just

fly away, they don’t mind.

In the wind, in the wind-

they laugh and sigh.

Words you have repeated

for ages and in between stages,

first as a child, when they settled

in the interstices of days and skies,

and seasons. They still ring,

become at one with the texture

of your own smile in things.

Mantras in life’s stanzas,

with no consistence

and no consequence,

shiny maybe just for this.

They have always made you

feel both foolish and divine,

brandishing the illusion,

the beribboned flashing of life.

 

 

WIND ON THE BEACH

You can shout and be shovelled away

in this swarming.

You sense you can shout whatever you like

in these snakes and ladders shot through the sky.

You see sand in a cloud while you are walking

the sunlit pavement rising towards the seafront,

the stage full of a bright rage launching

lace after lace into the open.

The swarming stare of the air where tracks fall apart

like the infinitely torn ventricles of a heart.

Smithereens of a god’s cheekbones who enjoys

being endlessly blown up in rumbling ribbons.

It’s an unframed huge breath on your face

that makes you sooner or later lower your gaze

and you think of all that’s lost at once and swarms

and there must be, must be something of yours here,

in this lashing of selves, forgotten, torn, or just being born,

in this rushing and crashing of nothing into nothing,

this throaty, hollering announcement of air into air,

or stares expanding and exploding into stares, lizards

stopped by in an aplomb of sky, gazing motionless

for a second - time stopping, time never ending-

and in the next just dashing, flashing away.

A tail scuttering or, so much for that,

a tale plunging beyond the edge of an odyssey,

or a heart in the wake of a perpetual lightning,

or hope in eternity of sun breathing through sail.

TOSSED UP

The stench is unmistakable,

a  shape on the black strand

half-buried in wet sand,

my dog  runs and rubs her back on it

paws in bliss cycling the sky,

I run too and shout “Away”

and she goes, reluctantly.

 

The ancestral need in an instant

of covering one’s smell

with a rotten other, wanting on instinct

to merge in the rot, the living with the dead.

The basic wish of plunging into what  

is gone and gnawed by the currents,

getting the scent, the tang

and the whisper of the whirlpool.

 

A spring sun shone on the beach

this morning, with a haze

like a choir slightly ablaze.

The sea roar stared from its maze.

Clouds cruising, glorious day

for a first swim.

The carcass was there, behind me.

I didn’t look at what it looked like.