National Poetry Month - Elizabeth Bishop

In celebration of National Poetry Month, I am posting one of my favorite poems of all time. I didn't know much about Elizabeth Bishop before reading her Wiki page, but it would just figure that she had associations with Vassar and Bryn Mawr, wouldn't it? Since some of my favorite people did some high learnin' thereabouts.

Anyway, here it is. Take your time and savor it.

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 and 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.

Elizabeth Bishop

National Poetry Month - One from Me

Yes, I used to be a poet. In college. I haven't written a poem in a very long time. Instead of rolling around in self-loathing, let's celebrate National Poetry Month by reading one of my own. It's a favorite of mine, even with a couple of moments that slide into over dramatic territory, it is still a very true and open thing.

Once, in Winter

Just this once
I will unsheathe this
fine, sharp weapon,
show you its shimmering
surface, reflections.

Look deep inside,
past the shine, the smoothwater
texture, the thin edge a tight,
hungry mouth moaning
for you to touch it, take
the blade into your skin.

Do you see him?
Far into the reflection –
he stands there, flexes
his muscular anger, snaps
his fingers into fists, exhales
hot steam and waits
under stars, brittle flecks of ice.

He seethes, you see,
he simmers in the cold.
He wants inside,
wants to snap our delicate
fingers like chicken bones.

Do you hear him?
I still hear his final
declaration, said again
and again, lunatic reason:
“I’m a man.”
We kicked his ass out,
threw his TV in the snow,
little women beating him
with big words, a bitch-in-heels
glance down a pert, pink nose.

Notice his physique, cut and
charmed from hours to kill in
prison, before he returned
to us, before he discovered
cocaine again.

Can you see that muscle clench
behind his eyes?
It sweats like dynamite.
He stands in the snow, cuts
the phone lines, imagines
his pretty girls are crawling
through the blackened house,
sweating like animals, smelling
like salt and urine.

That is enough.
The weapon is secured, locked down.
You won’t know the rest
but for these hands,
carved with scars, white and thick
from when I used to grab
this blade from the blind end,
never feeling how deep it cut,
how much of me it drained.