Edward Hirsch

Give me back my father walking the halls of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company with sawdust clinging to his shoes. Give me back his tape measure and his keys, his drafting pencil and his order forms; give me his daydreams on lined paper. I don't understand this uncontainable grief. Whatever you had that never fit, whatever else you needed, believe me, my father, who wanted your business, would squat down at your side and sketch you a container for it.

I lived between my heart and my head, like a married couple who can't get along. I lived between my left arm, which is swift and sinister, and my right, which is righteous. I lived between a laugh and a scowl, and voted against myself, a two-party system. My left leg dawdled or danced along, my right cleaved to the straight and narrow. My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation, my right stood upright as a Roman soldier. Let's just say that my left side was the organ donor and leave my private parts alone, but as for my eyes, which are two shades of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo. Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow while Adam puts his right foot down. No one expected it to survive, but divorce seemed out of the question. I suppose my left hand and my right hand will be clasped over my chest in the coffin and I'll be reconciled at last, I'll be whole again.

At this hour the soul floats weightlessly through the city streets, speechless and invisible, astonished by the smoky blend of grays and golds seeping out of the air, the dark half-tones of dusk suddenly filling the urban sky while the body sits listlessly by the window sullen and heavy, too exhausted to move, too weary to stand up or to lie down. At this hour the soul is like a yellow wing slipping through the treetops, a little ecstatic cloud hovering over the sidewalks, calling out to the approaching night, “Amaze me, amaze me,” while the body sits glumly by the window listening to the clear summons of the dead transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal. Some nights it is almost ready to join them. Oh, this is a strange, unlikely tethering, a furious grafting of the quick and the slow: when the soul flies up, the body sinks down and all night—locked in the same cramped room— they go on quarreling, stubbornly threatening to leave each other, wordlessly filling the air with the sound of a low internal burning. How long can this bewildering marriage last? At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire of stars flaming on the other side of the sky, but the body stares into an empty night sheen, a hollow-eyed darkness. Poor luckless angels, feverish old loves: don’t separate yet. Let what rises live with what descends.

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge, and I took the road to the right, the wrong one, and got stuck in the car for hours. Most nights I rushed out into the evening without paying attention to the trees, whose names I didn't know, or the birds, which flew heedlessly on. I couldn't relinquish my desires or accept them, and so I strolled along like a tiger that wanted to spring but was still afraid of the wildness within. The iron bars seemed invisible to others, but I carried a cage around inside me. I cared too much what other people thought and made remarks I shouldn't have made. I was silent when I should have spoken. Forgive me, philosophers, I read the Stoics but never understood them. I felt that I was living the wrong life, spiritually speaking, while halfway around the world thousands of people were being slaughtered, some of them by my countrymen. So I walked on—distracted, lost in thought— and forgot to attend to those who suffered far away, nearby. Forgive me, faith, for never having any. I did not believe in God, who eluded me.

Saturday morning in late March. I was alone and took a long walk, though I also carried a book of the Alone, which companioned me. The day was clear, unnaturally clear, like a freshly wiped pane of glass, a window over the water, and blue, preternaturally blue, like the sky in a Magritte painting, and cold, vividly cold, so that you could clap your hands and remember winter, which had left a few moments ago— if you strained you could almost see it disappearing over the hills in a black parka. Spring was coming but hadn't arrived yet. I walked on the edge of the park. The wind whispered a secret to the trees, which held their breath and scarcely moved. On the other side of the street, the skyscrapers stood on tiptoe. I walked down to the pier to watch the launching of a passenger ship. Ice had broken up on the river and the water rippled smoothly in blue light. The moon was a faint smudge in the clouds, a brushstroke, an afterthought in the vacant mind of the sky. Seagulls materialized out of vapor amidst the masts and flags. Don't let our voices die on land, they cawed, swooping down for fish and then soaring back upwards. The kiosks were opening and couples moved slowly past them, arm in arm, festive. Children darted in and out of walkways, which sprouted with vendors. Voices greeted the air. Kites and balloons. Handmade signs. Voyages to unknown places. The whole day had the drama of an expectation. Down at the water, the queenly ship started moving away from the pier. Banners fluttered. The passengers clustered at the rails on deck. I stood with the people on shore and waved goodbye to the travelers. Some were jubilant; others were broken-hearted. I have always been both. Suddenly, a great cry went up. The ship set sail for the horizon and rumbled into the future but the cry persisted and cut the air like an iron bell ringing in an empty church. I looked around the pier but everyone else was gone and I was left alone to peer into the ghostly distance. I had no idea where that ship was going but I felt lucky to see it off and bereft when it disappeared.

Wheel me down to the shore where the lighthouse was abandoned and the moon tolls in the rafters. Let me hear the wind paging through the trees and see the stars flaring out, one by one, like the forgotten faces of the dead. I was never able to pray, but let me inscribe my name in the book of waves and then stare into the dome of a sky that never ends and see my voice sail into the night.

I used to mock my father and his chums for getting up early on Sunday morning and drinking coffee at a local spot but now I’m one of those chumps. No one cares about my old humiliations but they go on dragging through my sleep like a string of empty tin cans rattling behind an abandoned car. It’s like this: just when you think you have forgotten that red-haired girl who left you stranded in a parking lot forty years ago, you wake up early enough to see her disappearing around the corner of your dream on someone else’s motorcycle roaring onto the highway at sunrise. And so now I’m sitting in a dimly lit café full of early morning risers where the windows are covered with soot and the coffee is warm and bitter.

I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy who perched in the branches of the old branch library. He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor, pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching notes under his own corner patch of sky. I'd give anything to find that birdy boy again bursting out into the dusky blue afternoon with his satchel of scrawls and scribbles, radiating heat, singing with joy.