The dead are a cadmium blue...

Tonight at dinner, L. and I started talking about how strange it is that by the end of the next decade, we'll be thirty. It's been dawning on me lately how life starts moving so much faster once you don't want it to. The boys I babysit for are suddenly the age I was when I started nannying, but it seems like just a year or two ago they were two and I was twelve. Now its twelve and twenty. I know I'm supposed to be spending this time of my life being young and carefree....so why do I feel so old and useless?

At least last week I had a little personal breakthrough in my poetry class. I've been limping along all quarter, trying to keep up in a class where extremely articulate and intelligent lit majors had me feeling that I was in over my head. I'm not big on talking a lot in class anyway, but when you feel like what you have to contribute is considerably less cultured or insightful than most everyone else...well, I just turn into a turtle and pull my head inside my shell. Anyway, I had turned in my second short-response paper (which I admittedly had put barely any energy into writing) expecting to get it back with a C grade at best. Instead, he gave me an A (hooray!) and wrote lots of nice comments all over it. I finally felt like maybe I was starting to grasp what everyone else already understood. It was so validating.

On that same day, we were discussing Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, which I hadn't really read much of before. Maybe I was just in a great mood from getting a good grade on my paper, or maybe I was having an emotionally charged day, but either way I absolutely fell IN LOVE with Bishop. I've been reading and rereading her section of my anthology, trying to glean every bit of insight I can from her words. I'm particularly enamored with the poem "One Art," which is an eulogy for Bishop's lost lover Lota (who had committed suicide just before the poem was written).

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn'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'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's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn'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't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The irony of this poem is that Bishop is clearly grieving a great loss in her life. It is a disaster; one she cannot have prepared herself for...and it's made me consider, more than once, how I deal with loss myself. And also how the other people in my life deal with loss. I don't know what conclusions I've drawn or if I've had any kind of epiphany about dealing with grief, but the poem is completely beautiful and, well, that's something.