suggested by two fifth graders),
a Canadian astronaut
wrings water out of a towel.
It stays by the towel,
horizontal
transparent isinglass,
a hyaline column.
Then begins to cover his hands,
his wrists,
stays on them
until he passes it to another towel.
On earth
some who watch this
recognize the wrung, irrational soul.
How it does not leave
but stays close,
outside the cleaning twist-fate but close—
fear desire anger
joy irritation
mourning
wet stuff
that is shining, that cannot go from us,
having nowhere other to fall.
SOUVENIR
I would like
to take something with me
but even one chair
is too awkward
too heavy
peeling paint
falls off in a suitcase
hinge sounds betray a theft
cheeses won’t keep
the clothespin
without its surroundings
would be mediocre
the big thunder rolled elsewhere
the umbrella is for sale
but in a desert what you want is a soaking
the do not disturb sign is tattered
I have many times taken
some café’s small packets of sugar
so that in Turkey
I might sweeten my coffee with China,
and in Italy remember a Lithuanian pastry
but where is the coffee
hands left and right useless
knees clattery
heart finally calm
as some hero at the end of a movie
squinting silently into the sun
you can’t hold an umbrella there anyhow
and what would he hang from the clothespin
THE MUST-MICE
Any hour is grain bin,
fragrant, many.
Soon the must-mice come.
Each takes
its one-mouse mouthful,
and is filled.
The bin empties
to its wooden sides and floor.
Hunger that
comes and goes
turns time into memory.
Mouthful
by mouse-sized mouthful,
houseful
by vanishing houseful.
THE CONVERSATIONS I REMEMBER MOST
The way a sweet cake wants
a little salt in it,
or blackness a little gray nearby to be seen,
or a pot unused stays good for boiling water,
the conversations I remember most
are the ones that were interrupted.
Wait, you say, running after them,
I forgot to ask—
Night rain, they answer.
Silver on the fire-thorn’s red berries.
TWO LINEN HANDKERCHIEFS
How can you have been dead twelve years
and these still
WORKS & LOVES
1.
Rain fell as a glass
breaks,
something suddenly everywhere at the same time.
2.
To live like a painting
looked into from more than one angle at once—
eye to eye with the doorway
down at the hair
up at your own dusty feet.
3.
“This is your house,”
said my bird heart to my heart of the cricket,
and I entered.
4.
The happy see only happiness,
the living see only life,
the young see only the young.
As lovers believe
they wake always beside one also in love.
5.
However often I turned its pages,
I kept ending up
as the same two sentences of the book:
The being of some is: to be. Of others: to be without.
Then I fell back asleep, in Swedish.
6.
A sheep grazing is unimpressed by the mountain
but not by its flies.
7.
The grief
of what hasn’t yet happened—
a door closed from inside
the weight of the grass
dividing
an ant’s five-legged contemplations
walking through it.
8.
What is the towel, what is the water,
changes,
though of we three,
only the towel can be held upside down in the sun.
9.
“I was once.”
Said not in self-pity or praise.
This dignity we allow barn owl,
ego, oyster.
PERSPECTIVE WITHOUT ANY POINT IN WHICH IT MIGHT VANISH
The way the green or blue or yellow in a painting
is simply green and yellow and blue,
and tree is, boat is, sky is
in them also—
There are worlds
in which nothing is adjective, everything noun.
This among them.
Even today—this falling day—
it might be so.
Footstep, footstep, footstep intimate on it.
RUNNER
It is hard to unlatch a day
from noun and story.
Breath pours
like water
from a small bowl into a large.
One says,
Quicker.
Another,
Listen, runner—
underwater things are fragrant to a fish.
THE BEAUTIFUL AUSTERE ROOM
This beautiful austere room—
(room in which you are dying,
room in which a – a
will still = a,
world – world = world)
They hold themselves
up from the water with effort,
an aging woman
walking up Eighty-Sixth Street,
slowly,
in painful pink shoes and pink gloves.
NOT ONE MOMENT OF THIS A SUBTRACTION
all day the daylight coming over the sill
like a wagon
drawn by invisible big-hooved horses working hard
soon now your breathing will climb inside it, go with it away
all your mountains and rivers
your cities and memories
doing their silent handsprings inside it
I PROFESS THE UNCERTAIN
I profess the uncertain
with gratitude
a man with large hands
and large feet
first looks at a pencil
then brings it close to his ear
he listens
the day lives briefly
unscented
shaken with worn-heel glimpses
becomes a shambling palace
with walking fishes
a yellow-roofed kindness
the almost untenable premise
that between counting one and two
nothing is lost
ZERO PLUS ANYTHING IS A WORLD
Four less one is three.
Three less two is one.
One less three
is what, is who,
remains.
The first cell that learned to divide
learned to subtract.
Recipe:
add salt to hunger.
Recipe:
add time to trees.
Zero plus anything
is a world.
This one
and no other,
unhidden,
by each brea
th changed.
Recipe:
add death to life.
Recipe:
love without swerve what this will bring.
Sister, father, mother, husband, daughter.
Like a cello
forgiving one note as it goes,
then another.
ENTANGLEMENT
A librarian in Calcutta and an entomologist in Prague
sign their moon-faced illicit emails,
“ton entanglée.”
No one can explain it.
The strange charm between border collie and sheep,
leaf and wind, the two distant electrons.
There is, too, the matter of a horse race.
Each person shouts for his own horse louder,
confident in the rising din
past whip, past mud,
the horse will hear his own name in his own quickened ear.
Desire is different:
desire is the moment before the race is run.
Has an electron never refused
the invitation to change direction,
sent in no knowable envelope, with no knowable ring?
A story told often: after the lecture, the widow
insisting the universe rests on the back of a turtle.
And what, the physicist
asks, does the turtle rest on?
but it’s turtles all the way down.
And so a woman in Beijing buys for her love,
who practices turtle geometry in Boston, a metal trinket
from a night-market street stall.
On the back of a turtle, at rest on its shell,
a turtle.
Inside that green-painted shell, another, still smaller.
This continues for many turtles,
until finally, too small to see
or to lift up by its curious, preacherly head,
a single un-green electron
waits the width of a world for some weightless message
sent into the din of existence for it alone.
Murmur of all that is claspable, clabberable, clamberable,
against all that is not:
You are there. I am here. I remember.
LIKE TWO NEGATIVE NUMBERS MULTIPLIED BY RAIN
Lie down, you are horizontal.
Stand up, you are not.
I wanted my fate to be human.
Like a perfume
that does not choose the direction it travels,
that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.
Yes, No, Or
—a day, a life, slips through them,
taking off the third skin,
taking off the fourth.
The logic of shoes becomes at last simple,
an animal question, scuffing.
Old shoes, old roads—
the questions keep being new ones.
Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain
into oranges and olives.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is grateful to Civitella Ranieri, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, under whose generous hospitality many of these poems were written. Also to the journals in which some of these poems first appeared, sometimes in different versions.
The American Poetry Review: “Cellophane: An Assay,” “Florists’ Roses,” “I Cast My Hook, I Decide to Make Peace,” “I Wake Early,” “Two Linen Handkerchiefs”
ARTS: “Perspective Without Any Point in Which It Might Vanish”
The Atlantic: “Perspective: An Assay”
The Cortland Review: “Honey,” “I Profess the Uncertain”
Discover: “Entanglement”
Five Points: “A Well Runs Out of Thirst,” “In Praise of Being Peripheral,” “My Sandwich” (as “A Cottage Cheese Sandwich”) (U.S., reprint), “Ordinary Rain. Every Leaf Is Wet.,” “Still Life” (as “Old Love”)
Great River Review: “A Hand Holds One Power,” “A man I once asked a question of has died; his son sends a letter,” “A map open on one table, a guidebook on the other,” “Anywhere You Look,” “The Beautiful Austere Room,” “Human Measures,” “Humbling: An Assay,” “I Know You Think I’ve Forgotten,” “Immigration & Hunger,” “Making & Passing,” “Still Life,” “Tri-focal”
Harper’s: “A Cottony Fate” (reprint)
The Harvard Divinity School Bulletin: “Runner,” “Three Mornings”
The Irish Times (Ireland): “February 29”
The Kenyon Review: “Mosquito” (as “My Pronoun”), “Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom”
Mission at Tenth: “Quartz Clock”
The New Republic: “Anatomy and Making”
The New Yorker: “In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights,” “I Wanted Only a Little,” “My Corkboard,” “My Life Was the Size of My Life,” “My Proteins,” “This Morning, I Wanted Four Legs”
The New York Times: “How Rarely I Have Stopped to Thank the Steady Effort”
Orion: “Not One Moment of This a Subtraction”
The Paris Review: “A Cottony Fate”
Ploughshares: “Hamper,” “In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed,” “Mop Without Stick”
Plume: “As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail,” “The Conversations I Remember Most,” “In a Room with Many Windows,” “Zero Plus Anything Is a World” (U.S., reprint)
Poetry: “A Chair in Snow,” “Fado,” “I Sat in the Sun,” “Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives In,” “Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied by Rain,” “My Eyes” (as “An Hour Is Not a House”), “My Species,” “My Weather,” “Once, I,” “The Problem,” “Souvenir,” “Things Keep Sorting Themselves,” “Works & Loves”
Poetry Daily (poems.com): “A Common Cold” (reprint)
Poetry London (UK): “In My Wallet I Carry a Card,” “My Sandwich” (as “A Cottage Cheese Sandwich”), “Zero Plus Anything Is A World”
Poets.org Poem-A-Day: “Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight,” “My Skeleton,” “A Person Protests to Fate”
Spillway: “Snow in April”
Spiritus: “In Space”
The Stony Thursday Book (Ireland): “All Souls,” “How Rarely I Have Stopped to Thank the Steady Effort,” “In Space” (all reprints)
The Telegraph (Calcutta, India): “In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights” (reprint)
The Threepenny Review: “A Common Cold”
Tin House: “The One Not Chosen”
West Marin Review: “Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight” (reprint)
Certain poems first appeared in the following anthologies:
The Alhambra Poetry Calendar: “In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights”; The Best American Poetry 2015: “A Common Cold,” The Best American Poetry 2012: “In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed”; The Best Spiritual Writing 2012: “In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights”; The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry: “In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed”; The Plume Anthology 2012: “All Souls,” “Immigration & Hunger,” “The Woman, The Tiger”; The Plume Anthology 2014: “A Photograph of a Face Half Lit, Half in Darkness”; The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXVII: “In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed”
A number of the poems in this collection also appeared in a limited-edition letterpress chapbook, Minus/My-ness, published by Missing Links Press, and in letterpress broadsides by printer Jerry Reddan, in his Tangram series.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Beauty; Come, Thief; After; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of poets from the past and is the author of two major collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. Her books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize; they have been named best books of the year by Th
e Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, and England’s Financial Times; and they have won the California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the Donald Hall–Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Harper’s, Poetry, Orion, Discover, The American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, The Pushcart Prize anthology, and seven editions of The Best American Poetry. A resident of Northern California since 1974, she presents her poems in universities, literary centers, and festivals throughout the United States and abroad. She is a current chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Also by Jane Hirshfield
POETRY
Come, Thief
After
Given Sugar, Given Salt
The Lives of the Heart
The October Palace