I’ve been reading “The Complete Poems 1927 -1979” by Elizabeth Bishop. She was born in 1911 and died in 1979. Along the way, she picked up just about every writing award available – Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships. And it doesn’t stop there.

I was introduced to Bishop’s poetry in the mid-1970s, and I “backed” into it. I was reading everything ever written by and about Flannery O’Connor, and she and Bishop had been good friends until O’Connor’s death in 1964 of complications from lupus. But once I finished reading O’Connor, I put Bishop aside. Only recently did I come across this volume of her complete poems, first published in 1984. Here is her poem “The Riverman” (1965):

[A man in a remote Amazonian village decides to
become a sacaca, a witch doctor who works with
water spirits. The river dolphin is believed to have
supernatural powers; Luandinha is a river spirit
associated with the moon; and the pirarucú is a fish
weighing up to four hundred pounds. These and
other details on which this poem is based are from
      Amazon Town, by Charles Wagley]

I got up in the night
for the Dolphin spoke to me.
He grunted beneath my window,
hid by the river mist,
but I glimpsed him – a man like myself.
I threw off my blanket, sweating;
I even tore off my shirt.
I got out of my hammock
and went through the window naked.
My wife slept and snored.
Hearing the Dolphin ahead,
I went down to the river
and the moon was burning bright
as the gasoline-lamp mantle
with the flame turned up too high,
just before it begins to scorch.
I went down to the river.
I heard the Dolphin sigh
as he slid into the water.
I stood there listening
till he called from far outstream.
I waded into the river
and suddenly a door
in the water opened inward,
groaning a little, with wter
bulging above the lintel.
I looked back at my house,
white as a piece of washing
forgotten on the bank,
and I thought once of my wife,
but I knew what I was doing.

They gave me a shell of cachaça
and decorated cigars.
The smoke rose like mist
through the water, and our breaths
didn’t make any bubbles.
We drank cachaça and smoked
the green cheroot. The room
filled with grey-green smoke
and my head couldn’t have been dizzier.
Then a tall, beautiful serpent
in elegant white satin,
with her big eyes green and gold
like the lights on the river steamers—
yes, Luandinha, none other—
entered and greeted me.
She complimented me
in a language I didn’t know;
but when she blew cigar smoke
into my ears and nostrils
I understood, like a dog,
although I can’t speak it yet.
They showed me room after room
and took me from here to Belém
and back again in a minute.
In fact, I’m not sure where I went,
but miles, under the river.

Three times now I’ve been there.
I don’t eat fish any more.
There is fine mud on my scalp
and I know from smelling my comb
that the river smells in my hair.
My hands and feet are cold.
I look yellow, my wife says,
and she brews me stinking teas
I throw out, behind her back.
Every moonlit night
I’m to go back again.
I know some things already,
but it will take years of study,
it is all so difficult.
They gave me a mottled rattle
and a pale-green coral twig
and some special weeds like smoke.
(They’re under my canoe.)
When the moon shines on the river,
oh, faster than you can think it
we travel upstream and downstream,
we journey from here to there,
under the floating canoes,
right through the wicker traps,
when the moon shines on the river
and Luandinha gives a party.
Three times now I’ve attended.
Her rooms shine like silver
with the light from overhead,
a steady stream of light
like at the cinema.

I need a virgin mirror
no one’s ever looked at,
that’s never looked back at anyone,
to flash up the spirit’s eyes
and help me to recognize them.
The storekeeper offered me
a box of little mirrors,
but each time I picked one up
a neighbor looked over my shoulder
and then that one was spoiled—
spoiled, that is, for anything
but the girls to look at their mouths in,
to examine their teeth and smiles.

Why shouldn’t I be ambitious?
I sincerely desire to be
a serious sacaca
like Fortunato Pombo,
or Lúcio, or even
the great Joaquim Sacaca.
Look, it stands to reason
that everything we need
can be obtained from the river.
It drains the jungles; it draws
from the trees and plants and rocks
from half around the world,
it draws from the very heart
of the earth the remedy
for each of the diseases—
one just has to know how to find it.
But everything must be there
in that magic mud, beneath
the multitudes of fish,
deadly or innocent,
the giant pirarucús,
the turtles and crocodiles,
tree trunks and sunk canoes,
with the crayfish, with the worms
with tiny electric eyes
turning on and off and on.
The river breathes in salt
and breathes it out again,
and all is sweetness there
in the deep, enchanted silt.

When the moon burns white
and the river makes that sound
like a primus pumped up high—
that fast, high whispering
like a hundred people at once—
I’ll be there below,
as the turtle rattle hisses
and the coral gives a sign,
travelling fast as a wish,
with my magic cloak of fish
swerving as I swerve,
following the veins,
the river’s long, long veins,
to find the pure elixirs.
Godfathers and cousins,
your canoes are over my head;
I hear your voices talking.
You can peer down and down
or dredge the river bottom
but never, never catch me.
When the moon shines and the river
lies across the earth
and sucks it like a child,
then I will go to work
to get you health and money.
The Dolphin singled me out;
Luandinha seconded it.

***

I’m glad I found her poetry again.

Photo by notsogoodphotography, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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