“Heavens, I recognize the place”

I enjoyed revisiting the photos I took at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, Nova Scotia the last time I was there, and I hope you’ll enjoy them, too.

I spent a lovely afternoon at the house with my friend Sandra Barry in November of 2015, and I included some of the photos in a blog post a few days later. If you missed Sandra’s poem “Old Rusty Metal Things,” which appeared on my blog back in April, you can find it here.

Sandra will be reading from her work at the Elizabeth Bishop House tomorrow, Saturday, July 8th, along with Margo Wheaton, Rosaria Campbell, and Kayla Geitzler. The address is 8740 Highway #2, Great Village, Nova Scotia. (Event page on Facebook.)

The kitchen at the Elizabeth Bishop House:

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove

and the child draws another inscrutable house.

(from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina”)

Why didn’t I know enough of something?

Greek drama or astronomy? The books

I’d read were full of blanks…

(from Bishop’s “Crusoe in England”)

“I stared and stared,” Bishop writes in “The Fish,” “until everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go.”

“A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies…. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.”

(from “In the Village”)

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

(from “Questions of Travel”)

Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!

It’s behind—I can almost remember the farmer’s name.

(from “Poem”)

A few months ago I looked up Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room” on my phone, when I was in a hospital waiting room. The person I was waiting for was having emergency surgery—and is now, thankfully, recovering well. But I didn’t know that would be the result during those hours I spent in that room.

It was Good Friday, a sunny spring afternoon, and the waiting room and hallways were empty. No one sat at the reception desk; no nurse came out to say anything to me. No copies of the National Geographic were waiting for me in that room. A small poster announced a campaign for “Doctors Helping Ukraine.” I studied the reflections of fluorescent lights on the plexiglass walls that divided the chairs from each other. I took photos of reflections and empty chairs. I had brought a book, but I realized what I wanted was Bishop’s poem.

I said to myself: three days

and you’ll be seven years old.

I was saying it to stop

the sensation of falling off

the round, turning world

into cold, blue-black space.

But I felt: you are an I,

you are an Elizabeth,

you are one of them.

Why should you be one, too?

I scarcely dared to look

to see what it was I was.

I read the poem twice, and wondered with Bishop, “Why should I be my aunt, / or me, or anyone?” And then I fell asleep, my head resting against one of the plexiglass walls.