Here is the poem. It’s called ‘At the Fishhouses.’
Here is the rock they sat on as he read the poem to her. It’s a man-made rock the city towed in as a barrier to the sea.
Here is the man. He’s not a poet, but he writes essays about poetry.
Here is the woman. She’s taking a bath and thinks about whether she should continue wearing baseball caps in public.
‘At the Fishhouses’ is a good poem. It takes up three pages. Little rhyme, but repetition and repetitions built from a sad time of living. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear—he quotes for the nine-hundredth time. What does that mean? He can’t just keep writing essays about Elizabeth Bishop. He coughs because otherwise he’d laugh and he doesn’t want to laugh because he’s in a library. He starts another letter to her. Opening line: I fell out of love with you a long time ago.
To her credit she remembers the poet. She has to—living with a man obsessed. But she remembers the poem as ‘The Fish,’ not ‘At the Fishhouses.’ I don’t care if you’ve caught a tremendous fish, Ms. Bishop—I went to Dartmouth. She’ll never see him again, never open another letter. Never call his mother to ask her how her leg is doing. The woman has daughters for that, a sensitive-ass son. She wants a son and wants him to look like Cary Grant or at least be sophisticated and half-foreign. But what if he gets hooked on steroids? His bones would ache, his hands burning up. Steroids and treating women like dogshit. If she couldn’t have that happen to him, how could she ever have him? She’s sick of questions and blows a bubble. She never liked sitting on rocks anyway—that magazine article warned of haemorrhoids.
It’s the best opening line he’s ever written. It’s certainly better than Tush! What was Shakespeare thinking? She’s never going to be able to put this one down. Instant classic—though that’s an oxymoron, but so what? He’s the teacher; he can make the rules! Except when it comes to her. Troubling. Once he controlled her and now he controls nothing. What should the second line be in the most devastating letter he’s ever written to another human?
She pushes the water and finds memories. Chokecherries at her grandmother’s house. What a grandmother, and what a house. She wants that house, but does the house want her? She lathers her elbows. It wasn’t really wrong of her to be in a relationship with him. He knew many things; he knew why the Thirty Years’ War started and the names of all the teeth. Big deal. Her feet are dirty and she runs the bar between her toes like a saw. It feels nice and she saws into hurt and the spaces glow clean, then bloody, and she thinks, This is my poem, cocksucker. Stay out of my tub.
To ease off and make her think he might have access to some psychological sense, he tries softer notions in the second line, settling on: This is not to say you don’t have a few good qualities. But then he goes a little berserk because Bishop would never slip such a sentence into one of her letters. She wouldn’t shirk poeticism and play in a sandbox of cliché. But when did this become about Bishop? It’s the unseen woman he has to deal with. The woman who broke the glue. Bishop and her fat nouns and verbs will always be on the page for him. A pushover, her. Turn and push over her. Abandon her for the abandoner—the one who shaves her legs on Tuesdays, the one who claimed her judgments got clouded from too much gluten.
Walking on heels and moaning, she flies onto her new bed and the expensive lime-green comforter billows out. Bloods slinks to her ankles, tickling stickiness. I’m so happy, she breathes into her mind. Blood in bed, blood on tongue. She leans over the side and looks for any hairs that may have fallen from his head. None, but the bed smells new, even fungible. He is the man I loved.
The letter ends at one line and he scurries through the stacks hungry for a river. Through the heavy doors he finds only clouds. They are bright but not clear. They don’t finish a story.
She lies in bed, cold. New or not, it’s all the same. The hour dark. Deep inside, her fingers pluck. She forecasts more breath and lets herself act how she was destined to act. In heat, with many cries and a heart timed not to flower.