The Frog King by Garth Greenwell
Appeared in The New Yorker 11/26/18
16 page story
Garth Greenwell is the author of “What Belongs to You.” His new book, “Cleanness,” is forthcoming in January 2020.
Greenwell has some interesting things to say about the challenges of writing happiness, of not writing about trauma. See below:
I did have a particular goal for this story: I wanted to challenge myself to write happiness. In part this is because I love these characters, and as I say above, elsewhere—not least in “What Belongs to You”—they’re treated quite roughly. The book this story is taken from, “Cleanness,” is in nine sections; “Frog King” is the fifth. I wanted this central story to extend something like grace to the characters, to fully dramatize a moment in which each achieves a kind of happiness for and with the other. It isn’t that suffering or discord are eradicated in that moment, but I do think they are consolidated in, or made intelligible by, an overarching happiness. I knew that there would be a scene of intimacy in the story, but I was surprised by the form that intimacy took.
I wanted a respite for these characters, then, a moment of happiness; but writing happiness was also an aesthetic challenge. To a certain kind of temperament—my temperament, I guess—the assumption that happiness is less interesting than suffering (“happy families are all alike,” etc.) and therefore a less worthy subject for art, seems natural, self-evident. But I think that assumption is wrong. It’s an aesthetic failing but also a moral one, it seems to me now, to see happiness, even very ordinary happiness, as somehow less profound, variegated, interesting, less accommodating of insight, than other kinds of experience. I worry sometimes, in contemporary fiction, that we assume trauma is the most interesting story we have to tell. (Again, I’m speaking of my own assumptions here, not attacking a foreign view.) I wanted to write a story without trauma; I wanted to challenge myself to take happiness seriously. The surprise for me was how painful it was to write it. “And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, / Bidding adieu,” Keats writes, and I felt the truth of his claim that images or narratives of happiness are the best conduit for melancholy. Maybe it’s just that one never escapes one’s temperament. I hope that “Frog King” is a genuinely happy story, that the happiness the characters find with one another is genuine. It was devastating to write.
What is this story about? A love story and travel piece, that moves from more homophobic Sofia/Bulgaria to Bologna & Venice, Italy. It is about coming out, going out. Love story that does not end in tragedy, despite characters taking risks, having different approaches to how to spend time, how to make love. Tension builds, making you think something bad might happen, and then we are surprised and relieved and thrilled when it doesn’t. Homoerotic story of intimacy, relationship struggles, physical and emotional yearning with an explicit, slow sex scene that ends in love and fulfillment.
Timing: Story takes place over 10-day vacation, discrete window of time. Limited amount of time is good for a story. Gives it book ends, walls, a container, everything must happen, start and end, within that time.
Threads are light, art, snow, love, secrecy, intimacy both hidden and explicit
Page 1: Story starts with light and snow.
It was too early for there to be so much light, so that when I woke my first thought was of snow. We had pulled the drapes before sleeping but they did almost nothing to darken the room, the snow caught scraps from street lamps and neon and cast them back up. It was bright enough to see R. still sleeping beside me, cocooned in the blanket I had bought after the first night we spent together, when I woke shivering to find him bound tight in the comforter we were sharing, swaddled beside me
Page 2: R see snow for the “first time,” first times and last times are always interesting to write about
He had seen snow for the first time that winter, and he loved to be out in it, to stand with his arms outstretched as it fell, his mouth open to the sky.
Page 2 Dog as character:
She might not be here, I had said, she isn’t always, she goes other places or maybe somebody takes her in, but she came quickly enough from her usual spot around the back of the building. She was beautiful, in her way, tawny and medium-sized like most of Sofia’s street dogs, too skinny and with mange along one side. She was happy to see us, I thought, happy as she always was to get attention, though she lacked the confidence of some of the other dogs; she stayed close to the wall, wagging her tail but not coming too near at first. Even when she let us pet her she tried to keep her distance, cringing in a sidling motion that brought her body within our reach but kept her head angled away, a mixture of eagerness and fear. Somebody had taught her that, I thought, somebody had beaten her, or many people had, but not in this neighborhood, here everyone was kind to her, she was a sort of communal pet. She lost some of her shyness when R. drew the packet of treats out of his coat pocket, clumsy in his mittens, which he had to take off before he could tear open the packet and pull out one of the strips of leathery meat. She started whining when she saw it, prancing closer, and he crooned her name, Lilliyana, though that didn’t mean anything to her, it was just a name he had invented, it suited her, he thought. Ela tuka, he said, a phrase I had taught him, come here, and he held out the treat so that she could take it, which she did by stretching her neck and pulling back her lips, taking hold of it with her front teeth, like a deer plucking a leaf. He had bought the treats the night before, when we were getting supplies for the next day; she should have Christmas dinner, too, he said. She let us pet her more vigorously then, finally coming close, even pressing her side against his legs as she begged for a second piece, which he gave her, though that was all for today, he told her, there would be more tomorrow. She seemed to accept this, she didn’t keep begging once we turned away, as most dogs would have, I thought; she disappeared behind the building again to whatever shelter she had found.
Page 3: Secret, couple is hiding the fact that they are gay, in public, this adds tension to the story, secrets are great for stories:
If it had been night he would have passed his arm through mine to keep me upright
Page 3: Christmas tree as elevated object, a way of expressing their love for each other, note closely observed detail makes us think we are in the room with them
R. saw the trees first, in the window of a little shop that was full of Christmas decorations. Even from outside you could see how cheap they were, all metal wire and plastic bristles, but R. insisted that we needed one, and ornaments, a box of lights; I want to have a real Christmas, he said. It was maybe three feet tall, it hardly weighed anything but it was cumbersome, I held it in both arms like a child as we walked. I felt a little ridiculous sitting with it on the train but R. seemed proud, he kept one arm around it to hold it steady on the seat between us. When we got home, he wanted to trim the tree right away, and he opened the box of tinsel to find that it was far too large, we hadn’t been paying attention, it was meant for a much bigger tree. He laughed as he wrapped it again and again around the branches; she was swaddled now, he said, it would keep her warm. Her, I repeated back to him, inquisitive, mocking him a little, and this gave him an idea: she needed a name, he said, and he decided to call her Madeleine, I don’t have any idea where it came from but he loved to say it. He liked to give things names, I think it was a way of laying claim to them, and he called out to her every time he passed, almost singing it, Madeleine, Madeleine. He saved the box of ornaments for Christmas Eve, little glass balls we hung from hooks on the branches, tucked among the tinsel. We knelt to arrange them, and when we finished R. sat back on his heels. Isn’t she beautiful, he said, taking my hand in his, but he answered the question himself: She is, isn’t she, I think she’s beautiful.
Page 4 Their romance is a bit of a secret, not easy to be gay man in Sofia, Bulgaria
But I did want to travel with R., to leave Sofia, where even when his friends were gone there was a pressure of secrecy, where it was too dangerous to hold hands in the streets, to kiss in public, however chastely, where everywhere we had to keep a casual distance; I wanted to be with him in a place where we could be freer with each other, a place in the West. It was my gift to him, a getaway, a bit of romance
Page 5: Breakfast, a series of little tensions and closely observed details that make you think the story will end in disaster, but it just adds up to the moments in which the couple learns to make room for and accommodate each other
It was early still—we had set our alarms, we wanted the whole day for the city—and I needed coffee first, which meant a complicated machine with a digital screen, then waiting for the paper cup to fill. When I turned back, I saw that R. had covered our table with little plates, a sample from each of the sweets. He hadn’t left any room for me, I stood for a moment while he tried to clear a space for my coffee, shifting the plates around until one almost tipped onto the floor, he caught it just in time. I made a little noise, exasperated and amused, and he looked up at me and shrugged. He would take a single bite from each plate, then move it to one side or the other, sorting out the things he liked. I watched him for a while, and then, Really, I said, my tone half question, half disbelief, making a gesture that took in the table with its plates, the room, the other people eating. He shrugged again, glancing around at the assortment of other travellers, businessmen mostly, a few couples. Who cares, he said, using his fork to dig into another piece of something, they don’t know me, we’ll never see them again, why should I care what they think?…
Page 5-6, first moment of real intimacy and some recklessness which adds to the tension:
Then R. stepped up onto the bench, he grabbed my shoulders and turned me to face him. Now I’m the taller one, he said, and bent down to kiss me, not a chaste kiss, he gripped my hair and tilted my head farther back to probe my mouth with his tongue. I tried to pull away, laughing: it was a busy road, we were in full view of the passing cars. But he held me tight, kissing me with urgency, until I realized that exposure was the point, that he wanted to show off, here where nobody knew him, where he could be anonymous and free, could live out an ideal of candor. He leaned into me,down to kiss me, not a chaste kiss, he gripped my hair and tilted my head farther back to probe my mouth with his tongue. I tried to pull away, laughing: it was a busy road, we were in full view of the passing cars. But he held me tight, kissing me with urgency, until I realized that exposure was the point, that he wanted to show off, here where nobody knew him, where he could be anonymous and free, could live out an ideal of candor. He leaned into me, pressing his pelvis into my stomach so that I felt his cock hard between us; it turned him on to show off like this, I had had no idea. I gripped him, using my body to shield us, I gripped him hard with both my hands through his jeans. I started to undo his belt, wanting to meet him in his daring, to show him I was game; and he moaned into my mouth before he pulled back and pushed my hand away. Porta-te bem, he said, slapping my face lightly and laughing, behave.
Pages 6-7 the actual Frog King statue/title of story/elevated object:
The bus left us in the Piazza Maggiore, where there was a huge wooden statue in the center of the square, a cylinder painted an uneven green. The bottom half was featureless, the top carved into the torso of a frog, regal and upright, his lips drawn back in an expression at once benevolent and severe. Two arms crossed at his stomach, four long fingers hanging down from each; above the half-lidded eyes there was a crown with four prongs. Cables stretched down from the statue’s midsection, securing it to the pavement; wooden barriers marked off a space around it. It would be burned, the man working at reception told us back at the hotel when we asked, it was the tradition, the old year burned at the turn of the new. I remembered something I had seen in a movie, Fellini maybe, a stuffed witch on a pile of kindling and old furniture, the trash of the past, the promise of an uncluttered future. I wondered why we didn’t do something similar in the States, where we love to pretend to start afresh, where we love to burn things down. There was nothing like it in Bulgaria, either,
Page 8: Beautiful, detailed descriptions of Morandi (unnamed) paintings, elevated object, this paragraph transports you to another place:
There were just a few rooms, open and uncluttered, the walls painted mercifully white; it wouldn’t take long for R. to make his circuit. I followed him barely looking at the paintings, which were small and unremarkable, or remarkable only for their plainness. They were quiet and unambitious, minor, I thought at first, still-lifes and modest landscapes, interesting mostly for having so little to do with everything else we had seen; the painter had spent his whole life in this city but seemed indifferent to the examples it offered, to the virtuosity and gorgeousness it prized. I found myself looking longer, looking more slowly, I let R. walk on ahead. The same subjects appeared again and again, household objects, plates and bowls, not filled witflowers or fruit but empty, set against a plain background. I stopped in front of one that showed a pitcher and cups, white and gray on a tan surface, behind them a blue wall. Something held me there looking, something made me lean in to look more closely. The cups were mismatched in color and in shape, the pitcher rose oddly elongated behind them, the whole painting was eccentric, asymmetrical. There was a kind of presence in the painting, I felt, I could sense it humming at a frequency I wanted to tune myself to catch. I liked the seeming naïveté of it, the way the simple figures had been simplified further, purified or idealized to geometric forms almost, but rendered bluntly, imperfectly. And the brushstrokes were imperfect too, visible, haphazard, the paint distributed unevenly, inexpertly; but that wasn’t right, really it was striving for something ideal, that was what I felt, the frequency I wanted to catch. What I took at first for blocks of color dissolved when I leaned in, were modulated, textured, full of movement somehow, not the movement of objects but of light, which fell across them gently, undramatically. But that’s not right either, it didn’t fall across them, there weren’t any shadows; I couldn’t locate the light at all, or tell if the scene depicted morning or noon. It was as if the objects emanated their own light, which didn’t move from one quadrant of the painting to another, as real light would, but vibrated somehow, so that there was a sense of movement and stillness at once. There was a promise in it, I felt, I mean a promise for me, a claim about what life could be.
Page 9: Characters are openly gay inVenice, generates a moment of discomfort, discomfort is always interesting to read about
He did this repeatedly, pulling me into doorways and alleys to kiss me, always somewhere a little apart, though we were still noticed, people passing would stare at us or look decidedly away. One heavy old man scowled; a young couple laughed, which I minded more. R. seemed not to notice but I noticed, it was a weird reversal: he was the more open one here, and I was hyperaware, feeling the reflexes of fear though I wasn’t afraid, I didn’t think I was afraid.
Page 12: These two sentences are what story is really about, and what a story can also be, “moments…that had changed the texture of existence for me":
I looked at him for a long moment before going back to my book. They could make a whole life, I thought, surprised to think it, these moments that filled me up with sweetness, that had changed the texture of existence for me. I had never thought anything like it before.
Pages 12-15 Great long, powerfully intimate sex scene, narrator kisses lover’s arm pits and the soles of his feet, among other things, slow, exquisite expression of love that ends in R crying.
He resisted less there, standing beside the bed, he opened his mouth to me, he let me draw him close and press my pelvis against his. He raised his arms for me to pull his shirt up and off, and I felt the mood shifting already, it lightened as his passivity became a game almost, his passivity and my insistence as I struggled with the buckle of his belt, the button on his jeans; I could feel him almost smile as I kissed him, as he answered me back more in his kisses, his tongue pressing against mine. I pushed his jeans and underwear down, breaking our kiss to kneel and hold them at his ankles while he lifted his legs free, kissing his cock, which wasn’t hard yet, just once before I rose again. He moved to kiss me again but I leaned away, then shoved him back, not hard, he could have resisted but he didn’t, he fell backward onto the bed. Onto our bed, I thought, which was what it had become in those days, not a lonely place but a place that belonged to both of us, a loving place; it was something I could think to myself but not say out loud. I took off my own clothes quickly and then launched myself on top of him, which made him flinch and laugh, just once and as if against his will. I caught myself with my hands and when he reached out his own hands, bracing them against my chest, I grabbed them one by one at the wrist and pinned them above his head. He made a noise at this, a little growl, interested and interrogative, as I ground against him, his cock harder now, mine fully hard. I lowered my face but dodged his kiss again, teasing him, and instead kissed his collarbone, first one side and then the other, and then the inside of his arm, just below the elbow, where I knew he was ticklish, and then I licked the pit of his arm, slowly, because I loved the taste of him, first the right and then the left, and he growled again. He was harder now, he pressed his hips up against mine, but I lifted myself off him, beyond his reach. He moaned in frustration, he tried to pull his hands free but I held them firm; Porta-te bem, I said to him, and then I did kiss him, I put my tongue in his mouth and he sucked at it hard, tasting me but tasting himself, too, that was what he loved, the taste of himself in my mouth. I broke off the kiss and dipped my head to his chest, kissing first one nipple and then the other, which he didn’t really like, he tolerated it, and then to go further I had to let go of his wrists, which didn’t matter, he kept them obediently above his head. I kissed his ribs and then his stomach, always one side and then the other, keeping a symmetrical pattern, keeping it at his pelvis, too, pressing my lips to his right hip and his left but avoiding his cock, moving quickly. He made a noise of complaint but kept his arms where I had left them, still playing our game. He jerked a little when I kissed the inside of his thighs, he was sensitive there, too, but he didn’t try to stop me, he was being good, he let me do what I wanted. But I wasn’t sure what I wanted, or what I wanted had changed. I had thought I wanted to make him laugh, that after that I wanted sex, but I didn’t want sex, I realized, or not only sex. I had let my knees drop off the end of the bed as I moved lower, soon I was kneeling on the floor at the foot of the bed. He was relaxed, more or less, his legs were outstretched, his feet splayed to either side, but his whole body tensed when he felt my lips on the sole of his foot, which he snatched away, I had to grab it and pull it back. He was ticklish there, too, he didn’t like to be touched there. It had been a line drawn early on, when it became clear I was more adventurous in sex, had a wider palette of things that turned me on; I hope you’re not into that, he had said, laughing, it’s gross, I don’t want you to be into that. It was a difference between us, that fewer things put me off, that I could be indifferent to something and still indulge it for my partner’s sake. That was what he did now, I guess, when he let me pull his foot back to me, holding it in both hands as I kissed the sole again, the arch and then the pads at the base of his toes, each of them, and then the toes themselves. What are you doing, he said, and I couldn’t answer, I wasn’t sure what I was doing as I took the other foot in my hands and repeated what I had done with the first. I was moving slowly now, the tone had changed; I didn’t want to make him laugh anymore, I didn’t know what I wanted him to feel. I kissed his ankles next, at three points, moving from the outside in, from right to left on his right leg, from left to right on his left, which would remain my pattern. Skups, R. said, a question in the way he said it, his name for me or our name for each other, a play on a Bulgarian endearment. But I didn’t answer, I made another band of these kisses, slightly higher than the first, and then another; I would cover him in kisses, that was what I wanted to do, and I would do it even though I could feel R.’s impatience, even as he said again Skups, and then, don’t be cheesy, which was his warning against too much affection, against my surfeit of feeling. I ignored it, moving up another inch. It would take a long time, I realized; when you imagine something like that you don’t think about how long it will take, how large a body is, how small a pair of lips. But I would do it, I decided, a kind of unhurriedness opened up in me, a weird wide patience I sank into. I strung kisses across him, his calves and knees, his thighs, the flesh firm in the center and giving at the sides. They were places I had never touched before, some of them, and this gave gravity to the moment, more gravity; I whispered I love you as I kissed him, and then two kisses later I whispered it again, which became a new pattern, to whisper it again and again. His cock was soft when I reached it, as mine was, I hadn’t noticed it until then. I almost passed over it, kissing his upper thigh on the right and then the left, but I didn’t skip it, I kissed it, too, as I had kissed the rest of him, and said again the words that somehow became more real with repetition. Usually words wear out the more you use them, they become featureless, rote, and more than any others this is true of the words I repeated to R.; even in our relationship that was still so new they had lost most of their flavor. I remembered the fear I had felt the first time I spoke them to him, weeks before, when they had had all their force; I had been terrified, really, not so much that they wouldn’t be answered (they weren’t, it would be days before he repeated them) as that they would scare him away, that he would startle like the wild thing I sometimes felt he was. But now we said them often, when we left each other and were reunited (even if it was only a room we left, only minutes we were separated). But repeating the words now didn’t dull them, it called them to attention somehow, to service, it restored them, so that they became difficult to say again; I found myself almost unable to speak as I whispered into R.’s silence, kissing the soft flesh of his stomach, the firmer flesh over his ribs, his nipples and the patch of hair at the center of his chest, his collarbone, the taut skin at his windpipe. His arms were still raised but he had folded them at the elbow, crossing his forearms over his face. I kissed his armpits again, the exposed undersides of his arms, and then (I was kneeling now, my knees on either side of him) I took his arms in my hands and moved them away from his face. He hadn’t uttered a sound in all that time, the fifteen or twenty minutes it had taken me to make my way up his body, not since the interrogative of my name, the admonition I ignored; there hadn’t been any change in his breath, or none I had noticed, and so I was surprised to see the tears on his face, two lines that fell toward his ears, he hadn’t wiped them away. He didn’t try to hide them when I moved his arm, or tried only by turning his face slightly, as if he didn’t want to meet my gaze (though his eyes were shut, there was no gaze to meet). I paused a moment, wanting to speak, to ask him what they were for, his tears, but I knew what they were for, and so I hung over him a moment before I continued kissing him, the line of his jaw, his chin, his cheek and lips, which didn’t answer mine, which suffered themselves to be kissed, his ears, the tracks of his tears, his eyes. It was a kind of blazon of him, of his body, I love you, I whispered again and again to him. And then, when I had laid the last line across his forehead—a garland, I thought, I had garlanded him—You are the most beautiful, I said to him, you are my beautiful boy, and he reached his arms up and pulled me down on top of him, clutching me tightly. You are, he whispered to me, you are, you are.
Page 16, Story ends in Portuguese ritual, with raisins, and a wish:
R. pulled away from me suddenly and reached into his coat pocket, taking from it the packet of raisins he had bought earlier with the wine. I almost forgot, he said, it’s almost too late. He handed me his bottle and took off one of his mittens so that he could open the packet. Give me your hand, he said, so I put the bottles on the ground and held it out to him, taking my glove off as he asked, and he counted out twelve raisins, placing them in my palm in a single line from my wrist to the tip of my third finger, then counting another twelve for himself. It was the Portuguese tradition, he had told me, a raisin for each month of the year that had passed, a wish for each month of the year to come. He looked at me and smiled, Skups, he said, feliz ano, and we kissed again. He ate his all at once, tossing them in his mouth and putting his mitten back on before he leaned down for his bottle and turned to watch the fire. But I didn’t watch the fire, I kept my eyes on him, though it was cold and I wanted to be back in the hotel with him, in the warmth of our bed. I took my time, I put the raisins in my mouth one by one, thinking a wish for each, though all my wishes were the same wish. ♦
Elizabeth Bishop poems mentioned by Greenwell in Q&A with Leyshon
At the Fishhouses
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Down at the water’s edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
“At the Fishhouses” from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. www.fsgbooks.com
Source: The Complete Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1983)
- In the Waiting Room
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.
I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.
From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used with permission.
