THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com/poetry
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hirshfield, Jane, 1953–
[Poems. Selections]
The beauty : poems / Jane Hirshfield.
pages cm
“This is a Borzoi Book”—Title page verso.
Summary: “A collection of original poems by Jane Hirshfield exploring the profundities and quirks of existence”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-385-35107-2 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-385-35108-9 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3558.I694A6 2015
811′.54—dc23
2014025831
Front-of-jacket image: Still Life with Peaches by Adrian Coorte. Private Collection /
Johnny Van Haeften Ltd., London / Bridgeman Images
Author photograph by Michael Lionstar
Jacket design by Stephanie Ross
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
FADO
MY SKELETON
MY PROTEINS
MOSQUITO
MY EYES
MY SPECIES
MY CORKBOARD
MY MEMORY
MY WEATHER
IN MY WALLET I CARRY A CARD
MY TASK
MY SANDWICH
A WELL RUNS OUT OF THIRST
IN A ROOM WITH MANY WINDOWS
A PHOTOGRAPH OF A FACE HALF LIT, HALF IN DARKNESS
A COTTONY FATE
CELLOPHANE: AN ASSAY
QUARTZ CLOCK
MY LIFE WAS THE SIZE OF MY LIFE
PERSPECTIVE: AN ASSAY
ORDINARY RAIN. EVERY LEAF IS WET.
THINGS KEEP SORTING THEMSELVES
I WAKE EARLY
IN A KITCHEN WHERE MUSHROOMS WERE WASHED
HONEY
HAMPER
FLORISTS’ ROSES
MOP WITHOUT STICK
THE PROBLEM
IN PRAISE OF BEING PERIPHERAL
A CHAIR IN SNOW
LIKE THE SMALL HOLE BY THE PATH-SIDE SOMETHING LIVES IN
WET SPRING
MANY-ROOFED BUILDING IN MOONLIGHT
ANYWHERE YOU LOOK
ANATOMY AND MAKING
I CAST MY HOOK, I DECIDE TO MAKE PEACE
A PERSON PROTESTS TO FATE
TWELVE PEBBLES:
A Hand Holds One Power
The Woman, The Tiger
Tri-Focal
I Know You Think I’ve Forgotten
Still Life
A man I once asked a question of has died; his son sends a letter.
Human Measures
Immigration & Hunger
Humbling: An Assay
For Fifteen Years
A map open on one table, a guidebook on the other
Making & Passing
I WANTED ONLY A LITTLE
A COMMON COLD
THIS MORNING, I WANTED FOUR LEGS
ONCE, I
IN DAYLIGHT, I TURNED ON THE LIGHTS
HOW RARELY I HAVE STOPPED TO THANK THE STEADY EFFORT
AS A HAMMER SPEAKS TO A NAIL
I SAT IN THE SUN
OF AMPLITUDE THERE IS NO SCRAPING BOTTOM
THE ONE NOT CHOSEN
SNOW IN APRIL
FEBRUARY 29
THREE MORNINGS
AWAY FROM HOME, I THOUGHT OF THE EXILED POETS
ALL SOULS
IN SPACE
SOUVENIR
THE MUST-MICE
THE CONVERSATIONS I REMEMBER MOST
TWO LINEN HANDKERCHIEFS
WORKS & LOVES
PERSPECTIVE WITHOUT ANY POINT IN WHICH IT MIGHT VANISH
RUNNER
THE BEAUTIFUL AUSTERE ROOM
NOT ONE MOMENT OF THIS A SUBTRACTION
I PROFESS THE UNCERTAIN
ZERO PLUS ANYTHING IS A WORLD
ENTANGLEMENT
LIKE TWO NEGATIVE NUMBERS MULTIPLIED BY RAIN
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
FADO
A man reaches close
and lifts a quarter
from inside a girl’s ear,
from her hands takes a dove
she didn’t know was there.
Which amazes more,
you may wonder:
the quarter’s serrated murmur
against the thumb
or the dove’s knuckled silence?
That he found them,
or that she never had,
or that in Portugal,
this same half-stopped moment,
it’s almost dawn,
and a woman in a wheelchair
is singing a fado
that puts every life in the room
on one pan of a scale,
itself on the other,
and the copper bowls balance.
MY SKELETON
My skeleton,
who once ached
with your own growing larger,
are now,
each year
imperceptibly smaller,
lighter,
absorbed by your own
concentration.
When I danced,
you danced.
When you broke,
I.
And so it was lying down,
walking,
climbing the tiring stairs.
Your jaws. My bread.
Someday you,
what is left of you,
will be flensed of this marriage.
Angular wristbone’s arthritis,
cracked harp of rib cage,
blunt of heel,
opened bowl of the skull,
twin platters of pelvis—
each of you will leave me behind,
at last serene.
What did I know of your days,
your nights,
I who held you all my life
inside my hands
and thought they were empty?
You who held me all your life
in your hands
as a new mother holds
her own unblanketed child,
not thinking at all.
MY PROTEINS
They have discovered, they say,
the protein of itch—
natriuretic polypeptide b—
and that it travels its own distinct pathway
inside my spine.
As do pain, pleasure, and heat.
A body it seems is a highway,
a cloverleaf crossing
well built, well traversed.
Some of me going north, some going south.
Ninety percent of my cells, they have discovered,
are not my own person,
they are other beings inside me.
As ninety-six percent of my life is not my life.
Yet I, they say, am they—
my bacteria and yeasts,
my father and mother,
grandparents, lovers,
my drivers talking on cell phones,
my subways and bridges,
my thieves, my police
who chase my self night and day.
My proteins, apparently also me,
fold the shirts.
I find in this crowded metropolis
a quiet corner,
where I build of not-me Lego blocks
a bench,
pigeons, a sandwich
of rye bread, mustard, and cheese.
It is me and is not,
the hunger
that makes the sandwich good.
It is not me then is,
the sandwich—
a mystery neither of us
can fold, unfold, or consume.
MOSQUITO
I say I
&
a small mosquito drinks from my tongue
but many say we and hear I
say you or he and
hear I
what can we do with this problem
a bowl held in both hands
cannot be filled by its holder
x, says the blue whale
x, say the krill
solve for y, says the ocean, then multiply by existence
the feet of an ant make their own sound on the earth
ice is astonished by water
a person misreads
delirium as delphinium
and falls into
a blueness sleepy as beauty when sneezing
the pronoun dozes
MY EYES
An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.
Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.
Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.
My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.
MY SPECIES
even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening
waters
grows tender,
grows tender and sweet
patience, I think,
my species
keep testing the spiny leaves
the spiny heart
MY CORKBOARD
However many holes are in you,
always there’s room for another.
However much you carry,
you can hold more.
Like a saint making a joke,
imperfection of surface
suits you.
Your seams
remind of quiet tectonic plates.
Chthonic corkboard,
always beneath
even when hung on your vertical side,
your waiting thumbtacks
seem to me
a glittering affection,
the mi casa, su casa
of a door standing open in every weather
of invitation.
I apologize to you, corkboard—
I, who would like
to be more like you in spirit,
cover you over
with maps, plans, bills.
Even these words that praise you
further disguise you.
MY MEMORY
Like the small soaps and shampoos
a traveler brings home
then won’t use,
you, memory,
almost weightless
this morning inside me.
MY WEATHER
Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious,
restless, stunned, relieved.
Does a tree also?
A mountain?
A cup holds
sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.
I hold these.
IN MY WALLET I CARRY A CARD
In my wallet I carry a card
which declares I have the power to marry.
In my wallet I carry a card
which declares I may drive.
In my wallet I carry a card
that says to a merchant I may be trusted to pay her.
In my wallet I carry a card
that states I can borrow a book in the town where I live.
In my hand I carry a card.
Its lines declare I am cardless, carless,
stateless, and have no money.
It is buoyant and edgeless.
It names me one of the Order of All Who Will Die.
MY TASK
An idea appears.
It catches
against the edge of the bedside table.
Coffee on the wall.
Coffee on the marble tabletop.
Coffee on the sheets.
The idea has flown everywhere with it.
Aplysia, marine snail of memory,
someone may someday find in your 20,000 neurons
this thought I have lost.
My task to find your less studied sister,
the erasing
and soapy sea sponge.
MY SANDWICH
So many things
you’d not have thought of
until they were given.
Even the simple—
a cottage cheese sandwich,
a heron’s contractible neck.
You eat. You look.
Then you look back and it’s over.
This life. This flood—
unbargained for as lasting love was—
of lasting oddness.
A WELL RUNS OUT OF THIRST
A well runs out of thirst
the way time runs out of a week,
the way a country runs out of its alphabet
or a tree runs out of its height.
The way a brown pelican
runs out of anchovy-glitter at darkfall.
A strange collusion,
the way a year runs out of its days
but turns into another,
the way a cotton towel’s compact
with pot and plate seems to run out of dryness
but in a few minutes finds more.
A person comes into the kitchen
to dry the hands, the face,
to stand on the lip of a question.
Around the face, the hands,
behind the shoulders,
yeasts, mountains, mosses multiply answers.
There are questions that never run out of questions,
answers that don’t exhaust answer.
Take this question the person stands asking:
a gate rusting open.
Yes stands on its left, no on its right,
two big planets of unpainted silence.
IN A ROOM WITH MANY WINDOWS
In a room with many windows
some thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.
Three silent bicyclists. Slowly, a woman on crutches.
It is like the night you slept out on the sandy edge of a creek bank,
feeling the step of some light, clawed thing on your palm,
crossing to drink. You were nothing to it.
Hummock. Earth clump. Root knob wild in the dark.
Like that thirsty creature, to you.
You could guess it, but you can’t name it.
A PHOTOGRAPH OF A FACE HALF LIT, HALF IN DARKNESS
Even 3 + 2 is like this.
A photograph of a face half lit, half in darkness.
A train station where one train is stopped
and another passes behind it,
heard, but not seen.
A person proud of five good senses
lives without echolocation.
Dogs pity our noses
as we pity the bee that blunders the glass.
Take out every other word of the world,
what is left?
A half half darkness.
A station one is and passes.
We live our lives in one place
and look in every moment into another.
As on a child’s map,
where X
marks both riddle and treasure.
It is near, but not here.
A COTT
ONY FATE
Long ago, someone
told me: avoid or.
It troubles the mind
as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog.
Now I too am sixty.
There was no other life.
CELLOPHANE: AN ASSAY
There are kinds of transparence.
Yours was invented
sometime between
tempered glass and Saran Wrap.
I have at times wanted to be you:
something looked through and past.
You were born noble: a tree.
Caustics and acids changed you
to what you now are,
protective, stiff, almost weightless.
Both captive and guard,
your desire is to be frivolous, self-destructive,
undone and opened.
Your bright red necklace announces:
“Tear here.”
Inside you, tobacco.
Inside you, peppermints, gingersnaps, gum.
You would not be found
wrapping a mattress or gun.
You were dictated into the world
by the muse of “it could be.”
You were unlikely but useful,
so kept.
Your art is audible, immodest:
to preserve against time.
In this, you are like a small metal flute
The Beauty Page 1
