To all those pretty houses and loudspeakers

To all those pretty houses,

Those mighty loudspeakers, 

Electrostatic, hybrids, B&W, JBL, Quad, 

I miss you guys, oh mys... 

Although you, Sonus Faber, are there 

Powerful, black piano perfectly, but silent

You are the vortex engulfing me

More than all the substratum of thee.

 

To my abandoned hot or cold pools

I say we are all just incredible fools 

Crying over things 

Missing dings, trebles and all that bass, 

You, that are lucky to still keep your ass.

 

Oh Square waves, oh intermodulation 

Total Harmonic Distortion, 

Oh gods of pool nights, sexy blues, 

Oh returning vinyl master, 

Yor compass, the bass, dispersion, 

You return to my Beyerdynamics 

Instead of Stax and Senheizer 

You are the stillness of moving mood

The intellectual support as essential food. 

 

Lucky with my daughters and boys

I still love my remaining toys

Forgetting the difference between men and boys, 

I sense that invitation to the blues

A moving violation

Just an invitation. 

 

Medium or scramble, a battle with booze 

A fight I cannot afford to loose. 

 

Depression is nothing but nature

As blues are sang on the front doorstep

I wait for that better half I haven't yet met. 

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

…

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

 

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) 

 

Thank You for your greatness, Elisabeth Bishop

May your dearly ghost, be praised,

And poetry raised to the summit, Humanity raised.