894
PARTISAN REVIEW
false entrances, I heard my mother sniff. Presently I finished reciting
and looked up at her. She was smiling ecstatically through the tears
that streamed down her face. "How wonderful, how beautiful,"
she said, and with the tenderness in her smile still growing she passed
me a hand mirror so that I might see the smear of blood on my cheek–
bone where at some indeterminable time I had crushed a gorged
mosquito by the unconscious act of propping my cheek on my fist.
But I saw more than that. Looking into my own eyes, I had the
shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds
and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite
an effort to gather again in the glass.
Elisabeth Bishop
o
BREATH
Beneath that loved
and celebrated breast,
silent, bored, really,
blindly-veined,
grieves, maybe,
lives and lets
live, passes,
bets,
something moving,
but invisibly,
and with what clamor
why restrained
I cannot fathom
even a ripple.
(See the thin flying
of nine black hairs
four around one
five the other nipple,
flying almost intolerably
on your own breath.)
Equivocal, but what we have in common's
bound to be there,
whatever we must have
equivalents for,
something that maybe I
could bargain with
and make a separate peace
beneath
within
if never with.
