November 2nd

On the second, I went out by myself (!) to Berl's Poetry Shop's grand opening, where I saw various poets read.  They each read one poem of their own and one by someone else.  Bianca Stone read a short prose piece by Elizabeth Bishop that I love.  It's about a fire at a neighbor's house when she was a very small child.  It made me tear up for some reason.  In it, Bishop describes being in her crib and seeing the flames reflected on the bars of her crib as her mother stood on the lawn handing out refreshments to the firefighters.  Bishop recalls being suddenly very thirsty and writes that her thirst persisted throughout her life.  (I have this somewhere.  It doesn't look like it's in the Collected Prose. I need to find it.)