The Beauty (7 page)

“This is your house,”

said my bird heart to my heart of the cricket,

and I entered.

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.

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.

A sheep grazing is unimpressed by the mountain

but not by its flies.

The grief

of what hasn’t yet happened—

a door closed from inside

the weight of the grass

dividing

an ant’s five-legged contemplations

walking through it.

What is the towel, what is the water,

changes,

though of we three,

only the towel can be held upside down in the sun.

“I was once.”

Said not in self-pity or praise.

This dignity we allow barn owl,

ego, oyster.

The way the green or blue or yellow in a painting

is simply green and yellow and blue,

and
tree
is,
boat
is,
sky
is

in them also—

There are worlds

in which nothing is adjective, everything noun.

This among them.

Even today—this falling day—

it might be so.

Footstep, footstep, footstep intimate on it.

It is hard to unlatch a day

from noun and story.

Breath pours

like water

from a small bowl into a large.

One says,

Quicker.

Another,

Listen, runner—

underwater things are fragrant to a fish.

This beautiful austere room—

(room in which you are dying,

room in which
a
–
a

will still
= a
,

world
–
world = world
)

I bring it flowers.

They hold themselves

up from the water with effort,

an aging woman

walking up Eighty-Sixth Street,

slowly,

in painful pink shoes and pink gloves.

all day the daylight coming over the sill

like a wagon

drawn by invisible big-hooved horses working hard

soon now your breathing will climb inside it, go with it away

all your mountains and rivers

your cities and memories

doing their silent handsprings inside it

I profess the uncertain

with gratitude

a man with large hands

and large feet

first looks at a pencil

then brings it close to his ear

he listens

the day lives briefly

unscented

shaken with worn-heel glimpses

becomes a shambling palace

with walking fishes

a yellow-roofed kindness

the almost untenable premise

that between counting one and two

nothing is lost

Four less one is three.

Three less two is one.

One less three

is what, is who,

remains.

The first cell that learned to divide

learned to subtract.

Recipe:

add salt to hunger.

Recipe:

add time to trees.

Zero plus anything

is a world.

This one

and no other,

unhidden,

by each breath changed.

Recipe:

add death to life.

Recipe:

love without swerve what this will bring.

Sister, father, mother, husband, daughter.

Like a cello

forgiving one note as it goes,

then another.

A librarian in Calcutta and an entomologist in Prague

sign their moon-faced illicit emails,

“ton entanglée.”

No one can explain it.

The strange charm between border collie and sheep,

leaf and wind, the two distant electrons.

There is, too, the matter of a horse race.

Each person shouts for his own horse louder,

confident in the rising din

past whip, past mud,

the horse will hear his own name in his own quickened ear.

Desire is different:

desire is the moment before the race is run.

Has an electron never refused

the invitation to change direction,

sent in no knowable envelope, with no knowable ring?

A story told often: after the lecture, the widow

insisting the universe rests on the back of a turtle.

And what, the physicist

asks, does the turtle rest on?

Very clever, young man, she replies, very clever,

but it’s turtles all the way down.

And so a woman in Beijing buys for her love,

who practices turtle geometry in Boston, a metal trinket

from a night-market street stall.

On the back of a turtle, at rest on its shell,

a turtle.

Inside that green-painted shell, another, still smaller.

This continues for many turtles,

until finally, too small to see

or to lift up by its curious, preacherly head,

a single un-green electron

waits the width of a world for some weightless message

sent into the din of existence for it alone.

Murmur of all that is claspable, clabberable, clamberable,

against all that is not:

You are there. I am here. I remember.

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.

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.

The author is grateful to Civitella Ranieri, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, under whose generous hospitality many of these poems were written. Also to the journals in which some of these poems first appeared, sometimes in different versions.

The American Poetry Review:
“Cellophane: An Assay,” “Florists’ Roses,” “I Cast My Hook, I Decide to Make Peace,” “I Wake Early,” “Two Linen Handkerchiefs”

ARTS:
“Perspective Without Any Point in Which It Might Vanish”

The Atlantic:
“Perspective: An Assay”

The Cortland Review
: “Honey,” “I Profess the Uncertain”

Discover:
“Entanglement”

Five Points:
“A Well Runs Out of Thirst,” “In Praise of Being Peripheral,” “My Sandwich” (as “A Cottage Cheese Sandwich”) (U.S., reprint), “Ordinary Rain. Every Leaf Is Wet.,” “Still Life” (as “Old Love”)

Great River Review:
“A Hand Holds One Power,” “A man I once asked a question of has died; his son sends a letter,” “A map open on one table, a guidebook on the other,” “Anywhere You Look,” “The Beautiful Austere Room,” “Human Measures,” “Humbling: An Assay,” “I Know You Think I’ve Forgotten,” “Immigration & Hunger,” “Making & Passing,” “Still Life,” “Tri-focal”

Harper’s:
“A Cottony Fate” (reprint)

The Harvard Divinity School Bulletin:
“Runner,” “Three Mornings”

The Irish Times
(Ireland): “February 29”

The Kenyon Review:
“Mosquito” (as “My Pronoun”), “Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom”

Mission at Tenth:
“Quartz Clock”

The New Republic:
“Anatomy and Making”

The New Yorker:
“In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights,” “I Wanted Only a Little,” “My Corkboard,” “My Life Was the Size of My Life,” “My Proteins,” “This Morning, I Wanted Four Legs”

The New York Times:
“How Rarely I Have Stopped to Thank the Steady Effort”

Orion:
“Not One Moment of This a Subtraction”

The Paris Review:
“A Cottony Fate”

Ploughshares:
“Hamper,” “In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed,” “Mop Without Stick”

Plume:
“As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail,” “The Conversations I Remember Most,” “In a Room with Many Windows,” “Zero Plus Anything Is a World” (U.S., reprint)

Poetry:
“A Chair in Snow,” “Fado,” “I Sat in the Sun,” “Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives In,” “Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied by Rain,” “My Eyes” (as “An Hour Is Not a House”), “My Species,” “My Weather,” “Once, I,” “The Problem,” “Souvenir,” “Things Keep Sorting Themselves,” “Works & Loves”

Poetry Daily
(
poems.com
): “A Common Cold” (reprint)

Poetry London
(UK): “In My Wallet I Carry a Card,” “My Sandwich” (as “A Cottage Cheese Sandwich”), “Zero Plus Anything Is A World”

Poets.org
Poem-A-Day:
“Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight,” “My Skeleton,” “A Person Protests to Fate”

Spillway:
“Snow in April”

Spiritus:
“In Space”

The Stony Thursday Book
(Ireland): “All Souls,” “How Rarely I Have Stopped to Thank the Steady Effort,” “In Space” (all reprints)

The Telegraph
(Calcutta, India): “In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights” (reprint)

The Threepenny Review:
“A Common Cold”

Tin House:
“The One Not Chosen”

West Marin Review:
“Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight” (reprint)

Certain poems first appeared in the following anthologies:

The Alhambra Poetry Calendar:
“In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights”;
The Best American Poetry 2015:
“A Common Cold,”
The Best American Poetry 2012:
“In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed”;
The Best Spiritual Writing 2012:
“In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights”;
The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry:
“In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed”;
The Plume Anthology 2012:
“All Souls,” “Immigration & Hunger,” “The Woman, The Tiger”;
The Plume Anthology 2014:
“A Photograph of a Face Half Lit, Half in Darkness”;
The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXVII:
“In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed”

A number of the poems in this collection also appeared in a limited-edition letterpress chapbook,
Minus/My-ness
, published by Missing Links Press, and in letterpress broadsides by printer Jerry Reddan, in his Tangram series.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight books of poetry, including
The Beauty; Come, Thief; After;
and
Given Sugar, Given Salt.
She has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of poets from the past and is the author of two major collections of essays,
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
and
Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.
Her books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize; they have been named best books of the year by
The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle
, Amazon, and England’s
Financial Times;
and they have won the California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the Donald Hall–Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Harper’s, Poetry, Orion, Discover, The American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, The Pushcart Prize
anthology, and seven editions of
The Best American Poetry.
A resident of Northern California since 1974, she presents her poems in universities, literary centers, and festivals throughout the United States and abroad. She is a current chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.