`Almost to Spirit'

On Thursday we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. We married in Nova Scotia at a place euphoniously named Murder Point, on Mahone Bay, southwest of Halifax. I had never visited Nova Scotia and have never returned. Its beauty and stony starkness have turned to myth in my imagination. We swam two or three times a day off a rocky beach in cold clear water, and ate seafood daily. We married on a bluff above the water. I read George Santayana’s The Realms of Being throughout our week in Nova Scotia, but my guidebook was Elizabeth Bishop.

She was born in Worchester, Mass., in 1911, and her father died when she was eight months old. Her mother grew mentally ill and was institutionalized in 1916. Elizabeth went to live with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, which shows up by name and implicitly in her poetry, often representing the first part of the title of her first book, North & South (1946). We never visited Cape Breton but in her poem of that title (from her second collection, A Cold Spring, 1956) Bishop describes a landscape I looked for and found in the southern part of Nova Scotia:

“The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack –
dull, dead, deep peacock-colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.”