2/8 is Elizabeth Bishop's birthday.
One Art is a villanelle by Bishop that I remember first reading in high school with the sense of holding my breath a little throughout, thinking about what the poet was going to lose next, and how she wrote about (Write it!) these painful and important losses with an attempt at nonchalance:
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
and then there's her Sestina, with these lines:
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
There's a lot in that quiet poem on grief, love, strength and the passage of time; a domestic scene where emotions simmer beneath everything and the household objects are not inanimate.
