Your irises hold pupils of Eternity.
Things so joined come undone, very painfully.

© 2026 Terrence Ross

I imagine I kneel, and I kneel to beg—
which brings Mary and the doorknob blonde
to scoff. “June, please be quiet,” in the voice
of one emptied in the night. Still I do see: in your eyes the Earth divides.

Was this the same Earth as yesterday?
Your extended hand, willfully neutral;
I fold my arms around you quickly at goodbye,
and briefly worship your strange ear, the straight fold there.

Blue Miricle

The day after your performance, morning
came, and it was just gone. There was
a robbed antechamber I couldn’t know
was there. Thus began the one-woman Void in me.

I worked on this one for hours, days really. It’s a new kind of modern sonnet called a Patsy. It’s like cutting experimental jewels.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-Elizabeth Bishop

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

--Elizabeth Bishop

lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

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.

One Art

By Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I love the look!

Elizabeth Bishop, (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956,

@chompie97.bsky.social I enjoyed doing the Connections today--I was introduced to a new poet in the puzzle, Elizabeth Bishop.

Connections
Puzzle #1014
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Wordle 1,736 2/6

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It was a cycle of thirteen. This lark was my favorite. I was thinking about "Being John Malkovich" when he went through his own portal. Oscar night.

I will have to write three thousand sonnets to get to the one hundred. ,

Not nightmare then, but paradise made near;
Not parody, but heaven taking shape;
Not language flattened into one word sheer,
But language finding what it could not fake.
For all things there, by taking after you,
Would not grow less themselves, but deeper true.

It would not be the comic hell of self,
That suffocating joke of mirrored room;
With you, such totalization were wealth,
A court of glory rather than a tomb.

VIII. If You Went Through Your Own Portal

If you went through your own portal and came
Where every sign and menu bore your face,
Where every voice and uttered word your name
Repeated back through some enclosing place,

I particularly love this portrait of the Carolina Parakeet. What a lovely creature it was. From Jacques Barraband, ‘Carolina Parakeet’ (1801) | ‘Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record,‘

The Carolina Parakeet would reportedly return to the hunting sites to mourn the loss of their flock members, making them easy returning targets for human hunters.

#thelongrescue

I want to do for you something like Neruda’s One Hundred Love Sonnets for Matilde Urrutia, except that mine would speak not from presence but from the void left by the singularity of a woman.

4
So rose and star and ruined world all prove
One thing: creation leans upon true love.

Terrence Ross
March 2026

3
But when the song begins where love has failed:
The sun still burns, the sea still crowds the shore.
Her grief becomes apocalypse in song—
If love is gone, what keeps the world in order?

2
He gives it music, breath—a sun-lit vow,
A promise leaning past the end of time;
As if true love, to keep itself from death,
Must turn creation’s ruin into rhyme.

Yet the Birds Go On Singing

1

When love stands fast, though tempests shake the air,
It is the star that Shakespeare would have known;
When seas go dry and rocks dissolve in glare,
Burns makes that constancy a rose in June.