9 June 2025

June, the days still grow longer, for two more weeks. In the Place St Sulpice the antiques market and the painters market will soon yield the space to the poetry market. I’ve been reading a lovely small book by Colm Toibin about Elizabeth Bishop. I actually finished it 2 or 3 weeks ago, and then began over. It makes it own special contribution to the EB literature in its lovely clear simple prose. The chapter I read a couple days ago was about Bishop story called ‘The Scream’ ; it’s a story about her Nova Scotia childhood and the scream is a scream of pain that ‘was not even loud to begin with… . 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.’ My thought was, I think, about Marianne Moore’s Steeple, and then I looked up from my book, and out across the street and my eyes saw the lightning rod on the roof of the church and I flicked it with my fingernail. And now I remember that about a year ago, returning from an errand, I walked along the back ( ‘the holy end’) of the church just as lightning struck and there was a crash of thunder, both together: hitting the lightning rod, I imagined.

I think I’ll take Toibin’s book On Elizabeth Bishop (2015, Princeton UP) back to the Bay Area with me. We fly early tomorrow morning.