from Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983) pp.89-90, 93-4.

      Elizabeth Bishop

      Questions of Travel (1956)

    [1]
      There are too many waterfalls here: the crowded streams
      hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
      and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
      makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
      turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
      --For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
      aren't waterfalls yet,
      in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
      they probably will be.
      But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
      the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
      slime-hung and barnacled.

      Think of the long trip home.
      Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
      Where should we be today?
      Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
      in this strangest of theatres?
      What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
      in our bodies, we are determined to rush
      to see the sun the other way around?
      The tiniest green humminghird in the world?
      To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
      inexplicable and impenetrable,
      at any view,
      instantly seen and always, always delightful?
      Oh, must we dream our dreams
      and have them, too?
      And have we room
      for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

      But surely it would have been a pity
      not to have seen the trees along this road,
      really exaggerated in their beauty,
      not to have seen them gesturing
      like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
      --Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
      the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
      of disparate wooden clogs
      carelessly clacking over
      a grease-stained filling-station floor.
      (In another country the clogs would all be tested.
      Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
      --A pity not to have heard
      the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
      who sings above the broken gasoline pump
      in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
      three towers, five silver crosses.
      --Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
      blurr'dly and inconclusively,
      on what connection can exist for centuries
      between the crudest wooden footwear
      and, careful and finicky,
      the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
      --Never to have studied history in
      the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
      --And never to have had to listen to rain
      so much like politicians'speeches:
      two hours of unrelenting oratory
      and then a sudden golden silence
      in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

      "Is it lach of imagination that makes us come
      to imagined place.s, not just stay at home?
      Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
      about just sitting quietly in one's room?

      (.ontinent city, country, society:
      the choice is never wide and never free.
      And here, or there . . . No. Should we haue stayed at home,
      wherever that may be?"

      Arrival at Santos (1952)

      Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
      here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:
      impractically shaped andÑwho knows?Ñself-pitying mountains,
      sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,

      with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
      some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
      and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
      is this how this country is going to answer you

      and your immodest demands for a different world,
      and a better life, and complete comprelhension
      of both at last, and immediately,
      afrer eighteen days of suspension?

      Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming,
      a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag.
      So that's the flag. I never saw it before.
      I somehow never thought of there being a flag,

      but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,
      and paper money; they remain to be seen.
      And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward,
      myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen,

      descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters
      waiting to be loaded with green coffee beaus.
      Plcase, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook!
      Watch outl Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's

      skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy,
      a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall,
      with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression.
      Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall

      s, New York. There. We are settled.
      The customs officials will speak English, we hope,
      and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes.
      Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,

      but they seldom seem to care what impression they make,
      or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter,
      the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stampsÑ
      wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter

      do when we mail the letters we wrote on the boat,
      either because the glue here is very inferior
      or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;
      we are driving to the interior.

      --Elizabeth Bishop, January, 1952