Filling Station
Elizabeth Bishop Written: 1965 • Published: 1965
This is an excerpt presented under fair use for educational purposes. Read the full text here.
Oh, but it is dirty! —this little filling station, oil-soaked, oil-permeated to a disturbing, over-all black translucency. Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty, oil-soaked monkey suit that cuts him under the arms, and several quick and saucy and greasy sons assist him (it’s a family filling station), all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station? It has a cement porch behind the pumps, and on it a set of crushed and grease- impregnated wickerwork; on the wicker sofa a dirty dog, quite comfy.
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Curator's Note
Only Bishop could make a grimy gas station into a meditation on love and domesticity. The opening is pure disgust—'Oh, but it is dirty!'—at this oil-soaked family business. But as her precise eye catalogs details, she notices incongruities: a doily on a taboret, begonias, comic books carefully arranged. Someone has tried to make this hellish place homelike. The final question—'Somebody loves us all'—emerges from these small gestures of care amid grime. It's theology from a gas station, proof that Bishop could find the profound in the most mundane American landscape.
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