National Poetry Month - Day 29
Sleeping on the Ceiling
--Elizabeth Bishop
It is so peaceful on the ceiling!
It is the Place de la Concorde.
The little crystal chandelier
is off, the fountain is in the dark.
Not a soul is in the park.
Below, where the wallpaper is peeling,
the Jardin des Plantes has locked its gates.
Those photographs are animals.
The mighty flowers and foliage rustle;
under the leaves the insects tunnel.
We must go under the wallpaper
to meet the insect-gladiator,
to battle with a net and trident,
and leave the fountain and the square.
But oh, that we could sleep up there.
As I was browsing through Elizabeth Bishop's complete poems, this one popped out, because it made me remember that, when I was a child and sick in bed, I would sometimes imagine what it was like if the floor were the ceiling. Not knowing Paris that that age, I never made the connections Bishop makes, but finding this sort of shared thinking is a treat.
Now that I have been to Paris, I also know that peaceful is not something to associate with the Place de la Concorde, which looks like this:
Photo: http://julian2434.0fees.net/wordpress/voyages/paris-o-paris-etape-5-place-de-la-concorde-champs-elysees
But of course, it's not meant to be understood literally. This is a trip in the imagination, the sort you take before finally drifting off to sleep.
While this poem doesn't follow a traditional poetic form, it does maintain its own--three lines of free verse followed by a rhyming couplet. The form reflects the way falling asleep generally works, as the chaos of the day subsides to pre-sleep rituals.