Elizabeth Bishop – Little Exercise

---

Elizabeth Bishop wrote ‘Little Exercise’ when she was living in Key West in Florida in the 1930s and 40s, inspired by the uneasy beauty of the area’s tropical storms. Fascinated by the unique geography of the Florida Keys—the shallow waters, the sudden weather shifts, and the constantly changing nature of the landscape—her draw to the psychic resonance of this environment comes through in this poem that gets us to imagine in such granular detail. I read it a bit like a guided meditation, meant to deliver me through the excitement of the world a to a place of repose and respite.

Little Exercise

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys
lying out there unresponsive to the lightning
in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron may undo his head,
shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment
when the surrounding water shines.

Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees
all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed
as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.

It is raining there. The boulevard
and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack
are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.

Now the storm goes away again in a series
of small, badly lit battle-scenes,
each in “Another part of the field.”

Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat
tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;
think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.