B.Z. Niditch- Two Poems

TS ELIOT'S WALK

At my poetry reading
a blue Bird is watching

under a lambent sun

I'm eating strawberries

on Cape Ann

where you gaze

by sails waking the light

at the last high tide

before you chose to be

exiled as an expatriate

to England,

your "Mother Country"

like Henry James,

but you too were formal

only to art

with words to make alive

and to play immaculately

with a vagary and sensibility

unlike your country's literati

as you sit on a bench

by Plum Island winds

long enough to hear

the sea going voices

by the whiplash 

of the waves

in your wing beat of a soul

in your transfigure strings

to change an epoch

with episodic breath

away from all your

crumbled demons

of a knotted

immediate green

in a harbinger of survival.

ELIZABETH BISHOPS DEMONS

That May locked you out

in a pinned depression

as you left Cambridge

and us for a season

for fine rainy Brazil

yet there was peace in

your silence, half heard

when you were asked

in a full auditorium

of poetry admirers

to recite from a collection

of dark blinding verse

as I peered at the doors

at your sheltered smile

as mount the podium

and austere gray rugs

as a high wired editor

of the Crimson asks you

after your reading

during the Q and A session

if you were really

in love with Robert Lowell

and your brief answer

so appropriate

with a brush of time

in your hands

sealing your world

at unknowable isolation

as you will soon allow 

a South American

wisdom to capture you

away from personal demons

of your own loneliness

as you meet someone

who became a life partner

beyond bypassed waves

in a blue aired saltiness

signed between lines

of my book

suspecting a friendship

by a fireplace aflame

at Memorial Hall

not forgetting how

memory embraces

into the guiding sunlight

of Harvard Square

in your stoplight eyes.