i believe...

as my friend matt says, here is the best emergency poem ever written. as i course through paris, readying to leave it tomorrow for rome, i find myself incanting it quietly, continually...


another unpublished poem of elizabeth bishop

I believe:
that the steamship will support me on the water,
& that the aeroplane will conduct me over the mountain,
that perhaps I shall not die of cancer,
or in the poorhouse,
that eventually I shall see things in a better light,
that I shall continue to read and continue to write,
that I shall continue to laugh until I cry with a certain few
friends.
that love will unexpectedly appear over & over again,
that people will continue to do kind deeds that astound me.

transplantation is necessary for all growing things...

I have come to Paris to become a writer, to become happy and to become rich. With these three reasons, I duplicate the motivations of most of the other new Parisians (are these not the reasons for moving not only to Paris, but to anywhere else?) As Hemingway writes: “Transplantation is necessary for all growing things.” So, I have decided to grow in Paris. It is a bargain I struck with the city before arriving: that if I am unstinting in my sweat and inky blood, its alchemy will do the rest. And as most other emotional refugees who drift towards Paris, I have not yet worked out any of the particulars of how this is actually going to happen. But I am not worried. If any of these things are ever going to happen (unbridled creativity, happiness, riches), they are going to happen here.

And if I were to judge from the 24-hour internet centers that are fueled entirely by homesickness (their keyboards slick with nostalgia – the ache of home) or the phone booths that are populated at the most uncomfortable hours of the night by the recently arrived (in hopes of reaching those that remained behind at a decent hour), I am still very much not alone.

As hard as the clichés of Paris and the Kafkian tendencies of French bureaucracy have tried to make Paris uncomfortable for the dreamy-eyed, it still exudes its mythic power over me, over us – its hopeful tribe. Here, I feel as if my most ordinary movements become balletic and that I communicate exclusively through human electricity. There is no compromise of friendly words or empty expressions. My expatriation to Paris, like love, is devastating and reconfiguring the self that I thought I knew. And that knowledge, after its bloody entrance, is made more scrutable. Paris can still be the metonym for joy; the idea of it seems to be built on an infrastructure of inexorability. If it were not for that, we would not be here, striking out for happiness – doing something so extravagant as to dream of these wild possibilities. It would appear unseemly anywhere else...

you set off, sweetie (as you said), to the stars...
like a dream of skipping stones
or skipping sapphires, rather...

do not blame me if
i choose geography,
perhaps just because it's easy - ...

we imagine an horizon, and it hardens
into faultless definition: the horizon.
it begins to illustrate imagination...
dear, other things that we imagined
were not often so obliging.
still the horizon is unbroken.

elizabeth bishop, unpublished poem