The Beauty Read online

  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)

  I bring it flowers.

  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?

  Very clever, young man, she replies, very clever,

  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