Jane Hirshfield

You work with what you are given, the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after. Clay that tastes of care or carelessness, clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust. Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table. There are honeys so bitter no one would willingly choose to take them. The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity, honey of cruelty, fear. This rebus—slip and stubbornness, bottom of river, my own consumed life— when will I learn to read it plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire? Not to understand it, only to see. As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, we become our choices. Each yes, each no continues, this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup. The ladder leans into its darkness. The anvil leans into its silence. The cup sits empty. How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

Stay, I said to the cut flowers. They bowed their heads lower. Stay, I said to the spider, who fled. Stay, leaf. It reddened, embarrassed for me and itself. Stay, I said to my body. It sat as a dog does, obedient for a moment, soon starting to tremble. Stay, to the earth of riverine valley meadows, of fossiled escarpments, of limestone and sandstone. It looked back with a changing expression, in silence. Stay, I said to my loves. Each answered, Always.

You are trying to solve a problem. You’re almost certainly halfway done, maybe more. You take some salt, some alum, and put it into the problem. Its color goes from yellow to royal blue. You tie a knot of royal blue into the problem, as into a Peruvian quipu of colored string. You enter the problem’s bodegas, its flea markets, souks. Amid the alleys of sponges and sweets, of jewelry, spices, and hair combs, you ponder which stall, which pumpkin or perfume, is yours. You go inside the problem’s piano. You choose three keys. One surely must open the door of the problem, if only you knew only this: is the quandary edible or medical, a problem of reason or grief? It is looking back at you now with the quizzical eyes of a young, bright dog. Her whole body pitched for the fetch, the dog wants to please. If only she could ascertain which direction, what object, which scent of riddle, and if the problem is round or elliptical in its orbit, and if it is measured in foot-pounds, memory, or meat.

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.

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.

Once, I was seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow, sleepy and nameless. As-ifness strange to myself, but complete. Light on the neck-nape of time as two wings of one starling, or lovers so happy neither needs think of the other.

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.

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

I have envied those who make something useful, sturdy— a chair, a pair of boots. Even a soup, rich with potatoes and cream. Or those who fix, perhaps, a leaking window: strip out the old cracked putty, lay down cleanly the line of the new. You could learn, the mirror tells me, late at night, but lacks conviction. One reflected eyebrow quivers a little. I look at this borrowed apartment— everywhere I question it, the wallpaper’s pattern matches. Yesterday a woman showed me a building shaped like the overturned hull of a ship, its roof trusses, under the plaster, lashed with soaked rawhide, the columns’ marble painted to seem like wood. Though possibly it was the other way around? I look at my unhandy hand, innocent, shaped as the hands of others are shaped. Even the pen it holds is a mystery, really. Rawhide, it writes, and chair, and marble. Eyebrow. Later the woman asked me— I recognized her then, my sister, my own young self— Does a poem enlarge the world, or only our idea of the world?

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. And 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.