The 5 pm update on Tropical Depression Three shows the forecast models in agreement. Among the little joys of life in the subtropics are the less-than-serious storm events the hurricane season can bring. Above, you see Tropical Depression Three, which may mature into Tropical Storm Bonnie as it enters the Florida Straits tomorrow. This means wind– maybe as much as 50 knots, but likely closer to 30– and at least a couple of inches of rain as the storm approaches, passes over, and leaves the Florida Keys tomorrow afternoon and night.

Here on the vulnerable and enduring Littoral, we keep Elizabeth Bishop's early Key West poems with our survival gear. She knew how to ride out a storm:

     It is marvellous to wake up together
     At the same minute; marvellous to hear
     The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
     To feel the air suddenly clear
     As if electricity had passed through it
     From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
     All over the roof the rain hisses,
     And below, the light falling of kisses.

     An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
     It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
     If lightning struck the house now, it would run
     From the four blue china balls on top
     Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
     And we imagine dreamily
     How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
     Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;

     And from the same simplified point of view
     Of night and lying flat on one's back
     All things might change equally easily,
     Since always to warn us there must be these black
     Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
     The world might change to something quite different,
     As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
     Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

Untitled Elizabeth Bishop poem from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, edited by Alice Quinn, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2006.

UPDATE: 7/23/2010 4:00 p.m.: What did become Tropical Storm Bonnie turned out to be even less than less-than-serious. As the poorly-organized and fast-moving system scurried across the Florida mainland, Key West saw an ordinary summer day: 80-something, breezy, sun, and clouds.

As promised, and right on schedule: the Royal Poincianas all over the island are now in full bloom.

The Royal Poinciana trees have just begun to set out their flowers. By the end of the month, the entire canopies will be full of the bright red or orange blossoms. Elizabeth Bishop was 26 years old when she first visited Key West in 1938. Her letters from that year, especially those to her friend and mentor Marianne Moore, are filled with descriptions of the subtropical island's flora and fauna.

Here's an excerpt from one of them:

May 5, 1938

It is spring here now and the Royal Poinciana trees are in bloom all along the streets– brilliant flame color or dark red. Also a large tree– Spanish lime?– that sheds in some places fine green powder all over the streets, very pretty. Jasmine makes the whole town smell sweet at night– and all the cats have kittens. There has been the ugliest mother cat I have ever seen, and two kittens, in the yard of the little house we're buying, for five days. I don't want them– they are crosseyed, mangy, and mixtures of white, black, orange, gray, and tiger– but they are growing so thin I couldn't stand it, so I took over a bottle of milk, and now they obviously consider themselves mine. The mother looks just like Picasso's Absinthe Drinker.

Though 72 years have altered Bishop's Key West immeasurably, she'd still recognize the house she bought that year at 624 White Street, which remains miraculously untouched. And she'd know the fine green Spanish lime pollen dusting the cars and sidewalks outside our office, the red Poinciana blossoms which have just begun to open, and the jasmine and jasmine-like perfume of the 21st-century night.

So you're home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready
To feast . . . Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it

With white wine, sugar and lime juice. Then bring it,
After we've drunk the Moselle, to the thickest shade

Of the garden. We must prepare to hear the Roamer's
Story . . . The sound of that slick sonata,

Finding its way from the house, makes music seem
To be a nature, a place in which itself

Is that which produces everything else, in which
The Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods,

Engaged in the most prolific narrative,
A sound producing the things that are spoken.

From Wallace Stevens's poem "Certain Phenomena of Sound," from Transport to Summer. The mangos are from Margaret Street.

Wallace Stevens began visiting South Florida and the Keys in the early 1920s with his good friend Judge Arthur Powell. Stevens was a director at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and these were prinicipally business trips, with a few days added on for pleasure. He was struck by what he found, so different from his New England upbringing, and his experiences here color many of the poems published in his first two books, Harmonium (1923), and Ideas of Order (1936). Stevens's first extant mention of the place comes in a letter to his wife, the former Elsie Viola Kachel, from Long Key on the tenth of January, 1922. In part, it reads:

Dear Elsie:
...
The contract arrived this morning, but instead of taking tonight's train for the North I am going to wait until tomorrow night's which should get me home on Friday night or Saturday morning. ... The sea is about fifty feet from the cottage in which I slept last night. This morning I just stepped out doors in my pajamas and used them as a bathing suit, taking a surf-bath. There are no ladies here so that one can do as one pleases. The place is a paradise—midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen. What a fool I should be not to come down here when I can give the results already achieved in return and still have a little fun out of it. I wish you could have come—that you could see how gorgeous it is. We must come together as soon as we can and every winter afterwards. I send you a check to enable you to keep things going until I get back.

With love,   
Wallace

It would be many years before Elsie accompanied Stevens on his annual jaunt to Florida. Stevens liked to do as he pleased, after all.

Quoted from Wallace Stevens's letter of Tuesday, January 10, 1922, as printed in Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, University of California Press, 1966.