It’s an unlikely conjunction, but this poem by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) puts me in mind of Patrick Kavanagh, the man whose credo was ‘Nothing whatever is by love debarred’. A garage forecourt, just like Kavanagh’s chest hospital, seems an unlikely place in which to find poetry, but I guess that if you bring to the business a kind of universal empathy, a reverence for the fact, then anything is possible.

Note how the poem moves from a tone of apparent disdain, albeit mingled with fascination, to a final humbling realisation that here too a spirit of love is at work, expressing itself in the family’s valiant efforts to add homely touches to their challenging and work-impregnated environment.

I won’t say that I exactly like this poem – in fact I feel a strong urge to clean my hands with Swarfega after reading it – but I have to admire a poet so prepared to boldly go where few if any have gone before her.

Filling Station

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.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
esso—so—so—so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

Elizabeth Bishop