january first

The year’s doors open
like those of language
toward the unknown.
Last night you told me:
                                  tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.

I opened my eyes late
For a second of a second
I felt what the Aztec felt,
on the crest of the promontory,
lying in wait
for time’s uncertain return
through cracks in the horizon.

But no, the year had returned.
It filled all the room
and my look almost touched it.
Time, with no help from us,
had placed
in exactly the same order as yesterday
houses in the empty street,
snow on the houses,
silence on the snow.

You were beside me,
still asleep.
The day had invented you
but you hadn’t yet accepted
being invented by the day.
—Nor possibly my being invented, either.
You were in another day.

You were beside me
and I saw you, like the snow,
asleep among the appearances.
Time, with no help from us,
invents houses, streets, trees,
and sleeping women.

When you open your eyes
we’ll walk, once more,
among the hours and their inventions.
We’ll walk among appearances
and bear witness to time and its conjugations.
Perhaps we’ll open the day’s doors.
And then we shall enter the unknown.

                                   Cambridge, Mass., 1 January 1975.

Octavio Paz, translated by Elizabeth Bishop.

*

Originally posted 1/1/2011.

gifts for the bookish

Il Bisonte leather bookmark / tote with literary quotation (Elizabeth Bishop, in this case) / cozy reading sweater / back issues + a subscription to Slightly Foxed /  Absorene book cleaner / subscription to the NYRB Classics / dictionary tape / a reading lamp by 2nd Shift Studio / teapot / a reading chair / book darts (I wish I could order these in bulk) / book sleeves to protect the books and magazines that travel with you.

(There were too many books to list.)

a book and a chair

1. Exchanging Hats.
2. Illum Wikkelso rocker at Sit and Read.

The trouble is - excuse my clichés - as people grow older, non-artists, that is, they do have to steel themselves so much, forget so much and try to pretend everything’s all right so much. They are afraid, probably rightly, that poetry - any art - if they take it hard, might upset them - so they pretend they like it while at the same time they resist it absolutely.

Elizabeth Bishop, in a letter to Robert Lowell dated June 17, 1963.

battered and shiny

The still explosions on the rocks,

the lichens, grow 

by spreading, gray, concentric shocks. 

They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, 

although within our memories they have not changed. 

And since the heavens will attend 

as long on us, 

you've been, dear friend, 

precipitate and pragmatical; 

and look what happens. For Time 

is nothing if not amenable. 

The shooting stars in your black hair 

in bright formation 

are flocking where, 

so straight, so soon? 

-- Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, 

battered and shiny like the moon.

Elizabeth Bishop, 'The Shampoo.' From A Cold Spring, 1955.

Douglas Rosin: Rare Brooch of the Moon and Stars by Los Castillo. Mexico, 1950s.

other arts

Paintings by Elizabeth Bishop. From William Benton's fascinating article on the NYRB blog.

this breathing plain of snow

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.

Elizabeth Bishop

Frederic Edwin Church: The Iceberg, 1891. Currently on view as part of the 'To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape' exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum.