Smackdab in the middle of last summer, I took a bus from Amsterdam to Prague. Standing at six-foot-three, long arms and even longer legs, it proved to be a wholly confined and delirious experience. It was a twelve-hour bus ride, crammed cheek-by-jowl; like a can of long since expired sardines. There were pockets of time were I just lingered on the cusp of sleep, heading nodding to and fro with the bus’s steady, onward trudge. Then, when I finally managed to slip into sleep, the bus would hit a bump and my head would slam into the plastic partition.

Examining “The Moose”, Bishop does a fantastic job of establishing the outside from the menagerie within. As the bus makes its ‘journey west,’ we are given snapshots of Bishop’s glimpses of scenery as it flits by her window. ‘…where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering. Gone.’ We are riding the bus with Bishop and, with her help, seeing through her eyes everything that she travels by; it’s all movement. Then we examine the innards of the bus: the woman with grocery bags, the snoring and reclining passengers, and the conversations of others. Slowly, as Bishop begins to drift off sleepily into ‘a dreamy divagation,’ and lulled by the endless conversations of the elderly, on any number of subjects; we too are anesthetized into a ‘gentle, auditory, slow hallucination…’

Wham-bam! There’s a moose right there is the middle of the ‘macadam’ street! When Bishop introduced the moose suddenly like this it was like my head slammed into the partition. I was, quite suddenly, awake and examining my surroundings. The same happens with the passengers. I believe that Bishop leaves the appearance of the moose till the very end to give it, or her, a sense of morality. If she had simply begun by introducing the moose, the jolt she created by throwing in its presence would have lost its abruptness—its pivotal mark. The presence of the moose, I believe, is Bishop’s representation of a far more universal conceptualization of nature. Furthermore, she shows us how unexpectedly nature comes into our lives. It is almost as if the moose is there to remind the passengers of another world, one beyond their ‘narrow’ and ‘rigid’ own. And, for a fraction of a second, they are amazed; in awe of this marvelous and ‘curious’ creature. Yet, just as quickly as they driver had stopped, the bus goes on. Only by adjusting yourself, ‘craning backward,’ can the moose be spotted for a fleeting moment.