ELIZABETH BISHOP TRAVELING 233joy? Maybe everlasting tides and human vicissitudes are eased by this communal
“jolt” of pure animal presence. In a poem “You should be surprised at seeing
something new and strangely alive,” Bishop said. So “the moose” needs to be
half animal, half poem.
Surprised somehow by joy, with childhood left behind, we feel our driver
shift into gear as an awkward stanza break sends us on our way.
For a moment longer,
by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there ’s a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.This whole poem arcing through life and memory has meant a “craning back-
ward,” which now rhymes slackly with “acrid.” Looking for what “can be
seen,” we end with “gasoline.” Life ’s like that, too true to prettify. As Bishop
said about “The Moose”: “It was all true.”
“I’d like to be a painter most, I think.” Indeed she was one, with a knack for
line, shape, color, and detail. Elizabeth Bishop’s seemingly naïve watercolors
slightly skew perspective, always surprising.
Shortly after “The Moose” she wrote “Poem,” about a great-uncle ’s oil
painting handed down by her aunt (and restored for this book), depicting the
village and landscape sometime before Bishop’s childhood. Her title hints that
“Poem” touches on the essence of what poetry can do.
About the size of an old-style dollar bill,
American or Canadian,
mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays
—this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?)Every verse has its doubts: the painting’s “about” the size, American “or” Ca-
nadian, “mostly” the same colors, and maybe a sketch. Right away her longing
enters the painting.
It must be Nova Scotia; only there
does one see gabled wooden houses
painted that awful shade of brown.
The other houses, the bits that show, are white.
Elm trees, low hills, a thin church steeple
—that gray-blue wisp—or is it?That steeple again, from the child ’s echoing memory. Surmising, unsentimental,