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Kathleen Spivack is an award-winning writer. She studied with Robert Lowell and remained friends with him for eighteen years, and is the author of many books, among them Moments of Past Happiness, A History of Yearning, and With Robert Lowell and His Circle. She has had residencies at the Radcliffe Institute, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the American Academy in Rome, and has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Commission. She teaches in Boston and Paris.

Ping Pong Sestina. For Elizabeth Bishop

Kathleen Spivack

On Monday mornings in your apartment we faced
each other across the net, two poets
having a go at ping pong. Your arthritic hands
gripped the paddle. Determined, you played
against my energy and youth, a tricky game
in which I held myself back, wanting you to win,

not to succumb to your age, or defeat: always to win.
You grinned with delight at the speed of the game,
pressing in for the slow shots, gingerly played
over the edge of the net: you, handling
your aching body and keeping the poetic
plonk of the white ball going. Wheezing, your face

was childlike. “Please call me Elizabeth.” But I couldn’t face
that. You were “Miss Bishop.” Elizabeth Bishop, Poet,
as in “Miss Bishop’s too noble-O.” Even with one hand
behind your back, whatever smallest edge you had you played
to advantage as if seeing angles were a game
and as if there were only one way of recording, one way to win

that cancelled all other alternatives. You so easily won
friends, admirers, yet always at play
was your encircled suffering, lack of love hinted, gamely
ignored; the poems and stories in which pain was handled
so far back behind the eyes that the poetry
stood for itself, was really poetry, not pain. You faced

it only obliquely. Once, showing me a photo, the face
of yourself as a baby, small, stubborn, not at all “poetic,”
protesting abandonment in crumpled white lace, hands
tightly folded as if your dear life, even then, was not a game,
as if you sensed you had something dark to play
out, a despairing intelligence behind that winning

little person. But it was late now. You were winded,
fighting arthritis, the ball. I found myself mentally playing
both sides of the table, cheering your game
so much more than my own. Did I hold back? Did I hand
you the final point? The match? No, you won on your poems
alone. Your austere inward face

was wickedly triumphant, handing me the paddle. “Shall we play
again?” Lunch was waiting, talk of books and poetry. But facing
winter noon in Cambridge, we started another game.

— Kathleen Spivack

 Written for the Memorial, Poetry Society of America, New York.

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