Sestina for Elizabeth Bishop

It took ten years for you to find the right word, 
or that’s what I tell my class – your poem pinned
all that time on your wall. Or was it glued? Twelve years? 
And what are years? I’m at a loss.
I’m jealous of your gold-bibbed toucan, of that drink 
that’s in your hand, your poems, the awards you held.

Brazil, a steep green valley, dinners held.
We’re at dinner when it comes to you, that word - 
we celebrate by getting drunk.
Perhaps you might recite for me, finally unpin
the poem from the wall. You’ve found what’s lost.
We drink to drown the sound of whooshing years.

What if I haven’t got ten years? 
Though you’ve not any now. You held
the toucan’s rigid body (accidentally poisoned), lost
control, blacked-out... Inscrutable. Was that the word?
The one you waited, so to pin?
What allows us to display such control as being drunk? 

Yet the abject vulnerability of being drunk
is also perhaps what we’ve sought for all these years.
This work of making angels dance on heads of pins!
Perhaps we think we might be held
to account this time; by Time. Amenable. That word:
you waited how long? Or did you lose

all sense of time, the way we lose
our sense of it in love, or drunk:
these longing, clashing sloshing words!
I’d bang my head against your head. So many years
and how little I’ve been held.
No, not quite true. The hope I pin

on air is all my fault. Your mother’s where I pin
the blame for your accrual of loss
Yet hummingbirds and shooting stars! Quick, hold
your breath for the black wave! Don’t drink
the wave, Elizabeth! A toast to better years!
I want to call you darling, kiss out words

I’ve held so precious, get word-drunk
to have you pin down, so precisely, every loss.
How many years must I wait for a word?