Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today is February 10th, 2020, and on Saturday, February 8th, it was Elizabeth Bishop's birthday.

She lived from 1911 to 1979, was an American poet, and certainly one of the most gifted and important poets of the 20th century.

She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956, the National Book

Award in 1970, and several other important awards. As I said, her birthday was on Saturday,

February 8th, and given that, I wanted to share with you one of the poems that I particularly

enjoy by her, one of the more interesting poems. It's called The Moose. It's a little bit on the longer side,

so I probably will not read it twice, but I think it's just one of her more intriguing,

interesting, and dynamic poems, so I wanted to share it with you. So again, here is Elizabeth

Bishops, The Moose, and this is how it goes.

From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides where the bay leaves

the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats

in a wall of brown foam, depends on if it meets the bay coming in, the bay not at home.

Where silted red, sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea, and others veins the flats, lavender,

rich mud, and burning rivulets. On red, gravelly roads down rows of sugar maples,

plaster-clapboard farmhouses, and neat clapboard churches, bleached, rigid as clamshells, past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon a bus journeys west,

the windshield flashing pink,

pink glancing off of metal,

brushing the dented flank of blue, beat-up enamel.

Down hollows, up rises, and waits, patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces

to seven relatives and a collie supervises.

...