Jane Hirshfield

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in, in me are lives I do not know the names of, nor the fates of, nor the hungers of or what they eat. They eat of me. Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink. And in my streets—the narrow ones, unlabeled on the self-map— they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow, and in my tongue borrowed by darkness, in hours uncounted by the self-clock, they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves. There too have been the hard extinctions, missing birds once feasted on and feasting. There too must be machines like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day. A few escape. A mercy. They leave behind small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.

I moved my chair into sun I sat in the sun the way hunger is moved when called fasting.

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider. One is a dock you walk out on, the other the spine of a thin swimming horse and the river each day a full measure colder. A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover. Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet, rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser by color. That’s autumn heat: her hand placing silver buckles with silver, gold buckles with gold, setting each on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty, and calling it pleasure.

My mare, when she was in heat, would travel the fenceline for hours, wearing the impatience in her feet into the ground. Not a stallion for miles, I’d assure her, give it up. She’d widen her nostrils, sieve the wind for news, be moving again, her underbelly darkening with sweat, then stop at the gate a moment, wait to see what I might do. Oh, I knew how it was for her, easily recognized myself in that wide lust: came to stand in the pasture just to see it played. Offered a hand, a bucket of grain— a minute’s distraction from passion the most I gave. Then she’d return to what burned her: the fence, the fence, so hoping I might see, might let her free. I’d envy her then, to be so restlessly sure of heat, and need, and what it takes to feed the wanting that we are— only a gap to open the width of a mare, the rest would take care of itself. Surely, surely I knew that, who had the power of bucket and bridle— she would beseech me, sidle up, be gone, as life is short. But desire, desire is long.

Little soul, you and I will become the memory of a memory of a memory. A horse released of the traces forgets the weight of the wagon.

They lie under stars in a field. They lie under rain in a field. Under sun. Some people are like this as well— like a painting hidden beneath another painting. An unexpected weight the sign of their ripeness.

There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they've been set down— and gravity, scientists say, is weak. And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before. There's a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh, as all flesh, is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest— And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.

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.

One day in that room, a small rat. Two days later, a snake. Who, seeing me enter, whipped the long stripe of his body under the bed, then curled like a docile house-pet. I don’t know how either came or left. Later, the flashlight found nothing. For a year I watched as something—terror? happiness? grief?— entered and then left my body. Not knowing how it came in, Not knowing how it went out. It hung where words could not reach it. It slept where light could not go. Its scent was neither snake nor rat, neither sensualist nor ascetic. There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing. Through them the belled herds travel at will, long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

There is a moment before a shape hardens, a color sets. Before the fixative or heat of   kiln. The letter might still be taken from the mailbox. The hand held back by the elbow, the word kept between the larynx pulse and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air. The thorax of an ant is not as narrow. The green coat on old copper weighs more. Yet something slips through it — looks around, sets out in the new direction, for other lands. Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed. As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road: it cannot be after turned back from.