Elizabeth Bishop (Элизабет Бишоп)
While Someone Telephones
Wasted, wasted minutes that couldn’t be worse, minutes of a barbaric condescension. --Stare out the bathroom window at the fir-trees, at their dark needles, accretions to no purpose woodenly crystallized, and where two fireflies are only lost. Hear nothing but a train that goes by, must go by, like tension; nothing. And wait: maybe even now these minutes’ host emerges, some relaxed uncondescending stranger, the heart’s release. And while the fireflies are failing to illuminate these nightmare trees might they not be his green gay eyes.
Elizabeth Bishop’s other poems:
