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  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

  Invitation

  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,

  no news the wind brings is without interest.

  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,