Poem for Tuesday and Ballard Flowers

For Elizabeth Bishop 

By Sandra McPherson 

The child I left your class to have   

Later had a habit of sleeping   

With her arms around a globe

She’d unscrewed, dropped, and dented.

I always felt she could possess it,   

The pink countries and the mauve

And the ocean which got to keep its blue.

Coming from the Southern Hemisphere to teach,   

Which you had never had to do, you took

A bare-walled room, alone, its northern   

Windowscapes as gray as walls.

To decorate, you’d only brought a black madonna.

I thought you must have skipped summer that year,   

Southern winter, southern spring, then north

For winter over again. Still, it pleased you

To take credit for introducing us,

And later to bring our daughter a small flipbook

Of partners dancing, and a ring   

With a secret whistle. —All are

Broken now like her globe, but she remembers   

Them as I recall the black madonna   

Facing you across the room so that   

In a way you had the dark fertile life   

You were always giving gifts to.   

Your smaller admirer off to school,   

I take the globe and roll it away: where   

On it now is someone like you?

-------- 

My Tuesday was fairly quiet -- chores in the morning, plus some more ancestry work that I had time for because Facebook was conveniently down so I wasn't distracted -- until early afternoon, when we walked to the park in gorgeous sunny weather. It was a fairly quiet day for waterfowl, but we saw both eagles -- one by the nest, the other eating something caught in the lake. My Voyager group watched the absolutely horrible "Spirit Folk", the sequel to "Fair Haven" -- one person couldn't come but asked us to please watch without her! 

Then we had eggs and waffles for dinner and watched The Holdovers, which is mostly excellent, very well acted, some similarities with Dead Poets Society, though there is a dissertation to be written about the black supporting characters from the school cook to the man who works in the mental institution and how their stories are placed in the background of the upper class white characters. Now I'm watching the episode of The Way Home I missed on Sunday and we better finally get some Jacob answers. Flowers at Ballard Locks on Sunday: