Jane Hirshfield

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 silence 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.

The woodpecker keeps returning to drill the house wall. Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another. There is nothing good to eat there: he has found in the house a resonant billboard to post his intentions, his voluble strength as provider. But where is the female he drums for? Where? I ask this, who am myself the ruined siding, the handsome red-capped bird, the missing mate.

Little soul, do you remember? You once walked over wooden boards to a house that sat on stilts in the sea. It was early. The sun painted brightness onto the water, and wherever you sat that path led directly to you. Some mornings the sea-road was muted scratched tin, some mornings blinding. Then it would leave. Little soul, it is strange — even now it is early.

It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books— Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

You change a life as eating an artichoke changes the taste of whatever is eaten after. Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat— not objectively present at all— and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow: to know if the distance between two things can be leapt. The piano, that good servant, has none of you in her at all, she lends herself to what asks; this has been my ambition as well. Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot whose water comes from far-off mountain springs. Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow, coldly delicious. For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn’t mind, not judgment. Teeth pass. Pain passes. Judgment decrees what remains— the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment of a boy-king entering Persia: “Burn it,” he says, and it burns. And if a small tear swells the corner of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him than a beetle fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children. The biologist Haldane—in one of his tenderer moments— judged beetles especially loved by God, “because He had made so many.” For judgment can be tender: I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever carries the quail. Yet however much I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you: you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth. When I have erased you from me entirely, disrobed of your measuring adjectives, stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns, when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter— not beautiful, not cold, only the color of butter— then perhaps I will love you. Helpless to not. As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk, find it sweet.

Does the butterfat know it is butterfat, milk know it’s milk? No. Something just goes and something remains. Like a boardinghouse table: men on one side, women on the other. Nobody planned it. Plaid shirts next to one another, talking in accents from the Midwest. Nobody plans to be a ghost. Later on, the young people sit in the kitchen. Soon enough, they’ll be the ones to stumble Excuse me and quickly withdraw. But they don’t know that. No one can ever know that.

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 cafe’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

Large moon the deep orange of embers. Also the scent. The griefs of others—beautiful, at a distance.

A thing too perfect to be remembered: stone beautiful only when wet. *     *     * Blinded by light or black cloth— so many ways not to see others suffer. *     *     * Too much longing: it separates us like scent from bread, rust from iron. *     *     * From very far or very close— the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle. *     *     * As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves, we listen to the murmuring dead. *     *     * Any point of a circle is its start: desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring. *     *     * In a room in which nothing has happened, sweet-scented tobacco. *     *     * The very old, hands curling into themselves, remember their parents. *     *     * Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

Seawater stiffens cloth long after it’s dried. As pain after it’s ended stays in the body: A woman moves her hands oddly because her grandfather passed through a place he never spoke of. Making instead the old jokes with angled fingers. Call one thing another’s name long enough, it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer. Call it a tree whose shape of   branches happened. Call what branching happened a man whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own. Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples, to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking. Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence.