A few months after we’d met, Farrar, Straus and Giroux released the complete correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. We pored over details of their respective stints in D.C. as poet laureate at the Library of Congress, and I wrote him a letter from a dry lecture on deficit policy that happened to take place at the Cosmos Club, where Lowell had lived in 1947 and ’48. “Washington winter weather is rather like Paris I find, without the compensations,” observed Bishop drily in a December 1949 letter to Lowell.

Thomas Travisano writes in the introduction that “these letters became part of their abidance: a part of that huge block of life they had lived together and apart over thirty years of witty and intimately confiding correspondence.” The volume became something I’d curl up with after arriving home to an empty bed, their poems  a means of expressing everything F. and I were still too tentative to say to each other. “Sometimes / I catch my mind / circling for you with glazed eye— / my lost love hunting / your lost face.” Our correspondence kept an oddly mannered and formal tone for all the flirty chatting. The novels we sent across the continent, the wry observations of two poets: it all allowed us to pretend this was a literary game, not one involving our very real, very breakable hearts.

Tell me why you love this book, I would ask, and he would.

“Love Stories” | The Paris Review | Phoebe Connelly

Oh! (Linked cred goes to El Roommate.)

profashional:

tallgirltales:

…of my parents on our hutch in the dining room. They’re at a concert (I haven’t a clue which one) and it’s definitely Summertime and they’re definitely at Ravinia. My mom is smiling an enormous smile and my dad is mid-laugh. They’re lying on their stomachs, propped up by their elbows, holding beer bottles. Whenever I head home I swear that I’ll make a copy. Of course I don’t, but I always wish I had, because in this small snapshot I see so much of my parents and what they’re good at. 

They’re good at summer and drinking beer. 

They excellent roadtrippers.

They’re determined and proud and easily the most accepting people on this planet.

They’re steller Jeopardy fans. 

They’re smart and each in such a different way…complementary intelligence, really.

They dance. When we were young it was to The Beach Boys in the living room. As we got older, at block party after parties…to Rod Stewart. And now it’s in the family room, slowly, after dinner, sometimes without any music at all. 

So whenever I embark on a stint down the highway, or twirl around looking like an idiot, or remember the cooler, or when I have an answer, I know it’s because of them. And I know it’s ridiculous to see all that in a picture, but they’re my parents and I suppose I just do. 

Happy Anniversary, Mom & Pai.