The art of losing isn&rsquo;t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn&rsquo;t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother&rsquo;s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn&rsquo;t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn&rsquo;t a disaster.

&mdash;Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan&rsquo;t have lied. It&rsquo;s evident
the art of losing&rsquo;s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

One Art

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house 
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Sestina

Arrival at Santos

At the Fishhouses

Crusoe in England

Filling Station

In the Waiting Room

For Louise Crane


In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road gose round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch, 
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

&mdash;Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing, 
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

Elizabeth Bishop

One Art

Sestina

Arrival at Santos

At the Fishhouses

Crusoe in England

Filling Station

In the Waiting Room

Letter to NY

Little Exercise

Little Exercise (audio only)

Elizabeth Bishop

Villanelles

Poems for Long-Distance Longing

Sestinas

One Art

Sestina

Arrival at Santos

At the Fishhouses

Crusoe in England

Filling Station

In the Waiting Room

Letter to NY

Little Exercise

Little Exercise (audio only)