I realized in all the time I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve neglected to include a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. She taught at Harvard just after I left, alas, my tenure there was deadly dull as far as poets went. Probably her most well known poem is a villanelle, called One Art. She and Lowell were great letter writers and a volume of their letters came out recently. She wrote a wonderful memoir of Marianne Moore, her mentor and friend, which is available online in the Collected Prose. Bishop lived with her lover in Brazil for many years. This poem is from that time.
It Is Marvelous to Wake Up Together
It is marvelous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvelous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air clear
As if electricity has passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses
Elizabeth Bishop
I love this young photograph of our poet with her pleasantly plump cheeks and her clear and sensuous reading of the electricity of love and the hissing of the rain. Right there for anyone to read.
I wonder if my life would have been dramatically different if she’d been at Harvard 4 years earlier? But maybe I was too green to have benefited anyway. And I certainly wouldn’t have met Larry.
You might have found yourself listening to the hissing rain, in all that electricity.
Sizzle.