When certain things get under the skin--as this poem has apparently gotten under yours--the energy of the subsequent scratching can spread it to others. I might never have been aware of this poem at all if you hadn't mentioned it, Jake.
(I've just given some less-than-stellar translations of Apollinaire's "Le Pont Mirabeau" a bit of a boost toward immortality, and every "Is this a poem?" or "What do people think of this poem/poet? I can't stand it/them" thread at Eratosphere does the same thing.)
It may offend our sense of justice that stuff and people we don't admire enjoy attention that we don't feel they deserve, while those we deem worthy of undying fame seem to languish in obscurity. But life's not fair.
Your side note mentions a Genius May Not Be Challenged attitude that I really don't see much around Eratosphere lately. (And in the past, when it was more frequent, it tended to be on a much pettier scale, by people who regarded themselves as geniuses, and who would respond to workshop criticism by waving their credentials around and dropping the names of bigshots who admired their work. Those strategies didn't tend to impress anyone, though.)
I did actually see
you taking a deferential position toward Genius in another thread recently, and I thought at the time, "Really? What does someone's batting average have to do with whether a particular at-bat is a home run or a strike?" But it didn't register strongly enough for me to say anything.
I will now, if it helps you to get over any feeling that we must treat respected poets as if
everything they wrote was perfect. To continue the baseball analogy, the best career batting average in history (Ty Cobb) was only .366, which means that he struck out more than half of the time. It is not disrespectful, and does not diminish his achievements, to say so.
In the poetry world, the more famous and revered a poet is, the more likely their strikeouts are to find a publisher, so that the magazine can forever brag about having published work by him or her. (The greater the poet, the more mediocre the poem itself can be before an editor turns down the opportunity for those bragging rights.)
Anyway, I'm glad you drew my attention to this Bishop poem, which I enjoyed very much. I like the notion of the concentric rings of the spreading gray lichen as a quiet ("still") explosion.
The reference to rings around the moon is not to rings like Saturn's, but to the different concentric shades of intensity in a
lunar halo. It's a common phenomenon on cold nights, even in relatively temperate San Diego. I see it a lot, on winter nights. Now that you know about it, look for it. Sometimes I see the colors of the rainbow in the rings, and sometimes just one or two bands of brightness.
I imagine the shooting stars in the poem as individual white hairs making bright streaks against the beloved's mostly-black hair, like meteors in a dark sky. They seem to do so "in formation" because the hair is straight, so all of these thin, bright streaks are aligned in the same direction.