I don't know Cabo Frio either and, rereading the letters, realise that I visualised it quite inaccurately through the years. I read her letters badly as they dropped through the letter-box into our so different lives, forgot details easily, preoccupied with such a different domestic scene. I imagined the long sandy beach, thought of the countryside as flat - the whiteness of everything certainly came through to me. There was another house on another beach years later at Duxbury in Massachussets. But I can walk along that beach any time - on a rainy English day, at night when I can't sleep, and see it, feel that wind freezing my face first on one side, then, walking back, on the other.
Every object is etched in words.
It is, for me, almost Bishop's most visual poem. Well, she's not only going to think there, but how well we can see her doing all those other things which are condusive to poetry. Reading the Cabo Frio poems and especially 'Twelfth Morning', I find there a great affinity with what I know of Maine. Today's my Annivesary, the day of kings' has no place in North Haven. But the locations themselves have much in common, especially the mist, the fog drifting in from the sea.