THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2011 by Jane Hirshfield
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hirshfield, Jane, 1953–
Come, thief : poems / by Jane Hirshfield. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Borzoi Book.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-59944-5
I. Title.
PS3558.I694C66 2011
811’.54—dc22 2010051493
Jacket photograph by Lane Coder/GalleryStock
Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde
v3.1_r1
for Carl
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
French Horn
First Light Edging Cirrus
The Decision
Vinegar and Oil
The Tongue Says Loneliness
Big-Leaf Maple Standing over Its Own Reflection
Critique of Pure Reason
Narrowness
These Also Once under Moonlight
“Distance Makes Clean”
Of Yield and Abandon
The Conversation
Perishable, It Said
Fourth World
Bruises
The Pear
Alzheimer’s
Heat and Desperation
Left-Handed Sugar
The Promise
Red Wine Is Fined by Adding Broken Eggshells
The Lost Love Poems of Sappho
Building and Earthquake
Each We Call Fate
The Visible Heat
Sometimes the Heart Is a Shallow Autumn River
Love in August
Two Rains
Washing Doorknobs
Chapel
Tolstoy and the Spider
For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches’ Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen
Sweater
Seawater Stiffens Cloth
The Inventive, Visible Hobbles
“Haofon Rece Swealg”
Shadow: An Assay
The Question
All Day the Difficult Waiting
Wild Plum
Sheep
The Dark Hour
Everything Has Two Endings
Protractor
The Present
It Must Be Leaves
Haibun: A Mountain Rowboat
Green-Striped Melons
China
Come, Thief
Sentencings
If Truth Is the Lure, Humans Are Fishes
Izmir
A Blessing for Wedding
Fifteen Pebbles
Like Moonlight Seen in a Well
Hunger
Mountain and Mouse
The Same Words
The Familiar Stairs
Rainstorm Visibly Shining in the Left-Out Spoon of a Leaf
Glass
Paint
A History
Memorial
The Cloudy Vase
The Perfection of Loss
Night and Day
Sonoma Fire
Opening the Hands between Here and Here
The Kind Man
All the Difficult Hours and Minutes
Rain Thinking
Contentment
The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident. I Thought of My Life
Three-Legged Blues
A Roomless Door
A Small-Sized Mystery
Bamboo
A Day Is Vast
A Thought
Pompeii
One Loss Folds Itself inside Another
Stone and Knife
Suitcase
My Luck
A Hand Is Shaped for What It Holds or Makes
I Ran Out Naked in the Sun
When Your Life Looks Back
The Supple Deer
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
FRENCH HORN
For a few days only,
the plum tree outside the window
shoulders perfection.
No matter the plums will be small,
eaten only by squirrels and jays.
I feast on the one thing, they on another,
the shoaling bees on a third.
What in this unpleated world isn’t someone’s seduction?
The boy playing his intricate horn in Mahler’s Fifth,
in the gaps between playing,
turns it and turns it, dismantles a section,
shakes from it the condensation
of human passage. He is perhaps twenty.
Later he takes his four bows, his face deepening red,
while a girl holds a viola’s spruce wood and maple
in one half-opened hand and looks at him hard.
Let others clap.
These two, their ears still ringing, hear nothing.
Not the shouts of bravo, bravo,
not the timpanic clamor inside their bodies.
As the plum’s blossoms do not hear the bee
nor taste themselves turned into storable honey
by that sumptuous disturbance.
FIRST LIGHT EDGING CIRRUS
1025 molecules
are enough
to call wood thrush or apple.
A hummingbird, fewer.
A wristwatch: 1024.
An alphabet’s molecules,
tasting of honey, iron, and salt,
cannot be counted—
as some strings, untouched,
sound when a near one is speaking.
So it was when love slipped inside us.
It looked out face to face in every direction.
Then it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud.
THE DECISION
There is a moment before a shape
hardens, a color sets.
Before the fixative or heat of kiln.
The letter might still be taken
from the mailbox.
The hand held back by the elbow,
the word kept between the larynx pulse
and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air.
The thorax of an ant is not as narrow.
The green coat on old copper weighs more.
Yet something slips through it—
looks around,
sets out in the new direction, for other lands.
Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed.
As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road:
it cannot be after turned back from.
VINEGAR AND OIL
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul,
right solitude oils it.
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Coming and going unfinished,
puzzled by fate,
like the half-carved relief
of a fallen donkey, above a church door in Finland.
THE TONGUE SAYS LONELINESS
The tongue says loneliness, anger, grief,
but does not feel them.
As Monday cannot feel Tuesday,
nor Thursday
reach back to Wednesday
as a mother reaches out for her found child.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Not a bell,
but the sound o
f the bell in the bell-shape,
lashing full strength with the first blow from inside the iron.
BIG-LEAF MAPLE STANDING OVER ITS OWN REFLECTION
For a dog,
A boat’s hull does not travel last year’s waves.
A lit window at night in the distance:
idea almost graspable, finally not.
“How many feet of skim milk does it take
to shingle a lamppost?”
my friend’s teacher would ask him.
“Lightning, like luck, lands somewhere,”
my friend would reply.
The feeling heart does not tire of carrying ballast.
The members of one Siberian tribe
spoke of good things in metaphor only:
“The gods are jealous, but stupid,” they kindly explained.
A lake-water’s listing, this knowledge.
Small winds disturbed the leaves of a nearby maple,
then turned them away—
whether toward suffering or from it, harder to say.
CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
“Like one man milking a billy goat,
another holding a sieve beneath it,”
Kant wrote, quoting an unnamed ancient.
It takes a moment to notice the sieve doesn’t matter.
In her nineties, a woman begins to sleepwalk.
One morning finding pudding and a washed pot,
another the opened drawers of her late husband’s dresser.
After a while, anything becomes familiar,
though the Yiddish jokes of Auschwitz
stumbled and failed outside the barbed wire.
Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,
as wit increases distance and compassion erodes it.
Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains.
A dog catching a tennis ball lobbed into darkness
holds her breath silent, to keep the descent in her ears.
The goat stands patient for two millennia,
watching without judgment from behind his strange eyes.
NARROWNESS
Day after day,
my neighbors’ cats in the garden.
Each in a distant spot,
like wary planets.
One brindled gray,
one black and white,
one orange.
They remind of the feelings:
how one cannot know another completely.
The way two cats cannot sleep
in one patch of mint-scented shade.
THESE ALSO ONCE UNDER MOONLIGHT
A snake
with two small hind-limbs
and pelvic girdle.
Large-headed dinosaurs
hunting in packs like dogs.
Others whose scaly plates
thistle to feathers.
Mammals sleekening, ottering,
simplified
back toward the waters.
Ours, too, a transitional species,
chimerical, passing,
what is later, always, called monstrous—
no longer one thing, not yet another.
Fossils greeting fossils,
fearful, hopeful.
Walking, sleeping, waking, wanting to live.
Nuzzling our young wildly, as they did.
“DISTANCE MAKES CLEAN”
Best when the gods changed
into rag and sandal,
thinness, wrinkle,
knocked, asked entrance.
Such test is simple, can be passed or failed:
The softest bed.
The meat unstinting.
But when from far and mountain
they would ask,
and for amusement, “What are mortals?”
even the flocking creatures came to tremble, cattle, sheep.
Scentless silent
then
the distant slaughters, like toy armies in the hands of boys.
OF YIELD AND ABANDON
A muscular, thick-pelted woodchuck,
created in yield, in abandon, lifts onto his haunches.
Behind him, abundance of ferns, a rock wall’s
coldness, never in sun, a few noisy grackles.
Our eyes find shining beautiful
because it reminds us of water. To say this
does not make fewer the rooms of the house
or lessen its zinc-ceilinged hallways.
There is something that waits inside us,
a nearness that fissures, that fishes. Leaf shine
and stone shine edging the tail of the woodchuck silver,
splashing the legs of chickens and clouds.
In Russian, the translator told me,
there is no word for “thirsty”—a sentence,
as always, impossible to translate.
But what is the point of preserving the bell
if to do so it must be filled with concrete or wax?
A body prepared for travel but not for singing.
THE CONVERSATION
A woman moves close:
there is something she wants to say.
The currents take you one direction, her another.
All night you are aware of her presence,
aware of the conversation that did not happen.
Inside it are mountains, birds, a wide river,
a few sparse-leaved trees.
On the river, a wooden boat putters.
On its deck, a spider washes its face.
Years from now, the boat will reach a port by the sea,
and the generations of spider descendants upon it
will look out, from their nearsighted, eightfold eyes,
at something unanswered.
PERISHABLE, IT SAID
Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
and below, in different ink,
the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.
I found myself looking:
now at the back of each hand,
now inside the knees,
now turning over each foot to look at the sole.
Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
then at the arguing jays.
Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
hunger, sorrow, fears—
these too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.
How suddenly then
the strange happiness took me,
like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,
inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.
FOURTH WORLD
A friend dies.
A horse dies.
A man dies over and over again on the news.
Without them,
the fourth world continues.
Waking fox-red on the flanks of the mountain.
Absence, anger, grief,
cruelty, failure—
The fox walks through them.
It wants, as she had, to live.
All day it is cool in the shadows, hot in the sun.
BRUISES
In age, the world grows clumsy.
A heavy jar
leaps from a cupboard.
A suitcase has corners.
Others have no explanation.
Old love, old body,
do yo
u remember—
carpet burns down the spine,
gravel bedding
the knees, hardness to hardness.
You who knew yourself
kissed by the bite of the ant,
you who were kissed by the bite of the spider.
Now kissed by this.
THE PEAR
November. One pear
sways on the tree past leaves, past reason.
In the nursing home, my friend has fallen.
Chased, he said, from the freckled woods
by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais.
Delusion too, it seems, can be well-read.
He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread.
The old fineness in him hangs on
for dear life. “My mind now?
A small ship under the wake of a large.
They force you to walk on your heels here,
the angles matter. Four or five degrees,
and you’re lost.” Life is dear to him yet,
though he believes it his own fault he grieves,
his own fault his old friends have turned against him
like crows against an injured of their kind.
There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy.
Descend, descend,
some voice must urge, inside the pear-stem.
The argument goes on, he cannot outrun it.
Dawnlight to dawnlight, I look: it is still there.
ALZHEIMER’S
When a fine old carpet
is eaten by mice,
the colors and patterns
of what’s left behind
do not change.
As bedrock, tilted,
stays bedrock,
its purple and red striations unbroken.
Unstrippable birthright grandeur.
“How are you,” I asked,