The Shampoo

The scheduled-update Blog Ghost (A.K.A. Claire from the past) is back as current Claire frolics around the Cape with her good friend Jo.

Here is one of my favorite-ever poems. The lines "you've been, dear friend, / precipitate and pragmatical" are some of the better lines in twentieth-century poetry, to the best of my knowledge and opinion.

"The Shampoo"

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

-Elizabeth Bishop, from A Cold Spring (1955)