Thursday, May 3, 2022

Rebecca Hennessy & Elizabeth Bishop

Little Exercise (at 4 a.m.)

by Elizabeth Bishop

for Thomas Edwards Wanning

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily

like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,

listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys

lying out there unresponsive to the lightning

in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron may undo his head,

shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment

when the surrounding water shines.

Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees

all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed

as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.

It is raining there. The boulevard

and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack

are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.

Now the storm goes away again in a series

of small, badly lit battle-scenes,

each in "Another part of the field."

Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat

tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;

think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.

It is another big day in the world. Take a minute, two? three? to breath. To forget. To remember. To be whatever, whomever, you are at 4 a.m. This poem, when written in 1946, was titled Little Exercise at 4 a.m. I don't know when or why the title was shortened. (I will be a little more digging.) But there is something about 4 a.m., as exact, measured, precise as 4 a.m. is in time, that is also and easily untethered, even meaningless. 4 a.m. is dark. A darkness that is velvet, a dark that is soot - a transformed or transforming texture. Anyway. Today, as the world burns, the Supreme Court rages, Russia continues warring, breath into what 4 a.m. means to you, what it is to you. What is does to your own body. Settle you brain in the bottom of Elizabeth's row-boat. Be uninjured. Undisturbed.