I am too big. Too big by
far. Pity me.
My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my
one great beauty, even
so. They see too much, above, below. And yet, there is
not much
to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on
my skin
in drops. The drops run down my back, run from the
corners of
my downturned mouth, run down my sides and drip
beneath
my belly. Perhaps the droplets on my mottled hide are
pretty,
like dewdrops, silver on a moldering leaf? They chill
me
through and through. I feel my colors changing now, my
pig-
ments gradually shudder and shift over.
Now I shall get beneath that
overhanging ledge. Slowly. Hop.
Two or three times more, silently. That was too far.
I'm
standing up. The lichen's gray, and rough to my front
feet. Get
down. Turn facing out, it's safer. Don't breathe until
the snail
gets by. But we go travelling the same weathers.
Swallow the air and mouthfuls of cold mist. Give
voice, just
once. O how it echoed from the rock! What a profound,
angelic
bell I rang!
I live, I breathe, by swallowing.
Once, some naughty children
picked me up, me and two brothers. They set us down
again
somewhere and in our mouths they put lit cigarettes.
We could
not help but smoke them, to the end. I thought it was
the death
of me, but when I was entirely filled with smoke, when
my slack
mouth was burning, and all my tripes were hot and dry,
they
let us go. But I was sick for days.
I have big shoulders, like a boxer.
They are not muscle,
however, and their color is dark. They are my sacs of
poison,
the almost unused poison that I bear, my burden and my
great
responsibility. Big wings of poison, folded on my
back. Beware,
I am an angel in disguise; my wings are evil, but not
deadly. If
I will it, the poison could break through, blue-black,
and
dangerous to all. Blue-black fumes would rise upon the
air.
Beware, you frivolous crab.
"[Elizabeth] Bishop was fortunate to launch her career at a time when she could choose among a wide range of
viable poetic idioms. She seems never to have felt that oppression in the face of the achievement of her modernist predecessors that James
Breslin argues was an essential characteristic of her generation. Some twenty years earlier, pioneers like Pound, Williams, Stevens, and
Marianne Moore had had to grope and experiment, freeing themselves from outdated models while producing, some of htem, a considerable body
of problematic or derivative verse befor they could originate a suitable style and voice...." Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development,
Thomas J. Travisano (1988)
,
Thomas J. Travisano (1988)
