Come, Thief

by Jane Hirshfield

  not knowing what to expect.

  “Contrary to Keatsian joy,” he replied.

  HEAT AND DESPERATION

  Preparation, she thought,

  as if a pianist,

  limbering, stretching.

  But fingers are tendon, not spirit;

  are bone and muscle and skin.

  Increase of reach extends reach,

  but not what comes then to fill it.

  What comes to fill it is something that has no name,

  a hunger from outside the wolf-colored edges.

  Thirteen smoke jumpers died at Mann Gulch.

  Two ran faster.

  One stopped, set a match ahead of himself,

  ahead of the fire. Then stepped upslope,

  lay down inside still-burning ashes, and lived.

  LEFT-HANDED SUGAR

  In nature, molecules are chiral—they turn in one direction or the other. Naturally then, someone wondered: might sugar, built to mirror itself, be sweet, but pass through the body unnoticed? A dieter’s gold mine. I don’t know why the experiment failed, or how. I think of the loneliness of that man-made substance, like a ghost in a ’50s movie you could pass your hand through, or some suitor always rejected despite the sparkle of his cubic zirconia ring. Yet this sugar is real, and somewhere exists. It looks for a left-handed tongue.

  THE PROMISE

  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.

  RED WINE IS FINED BY ADDING BROKEN EGGSHELLS

  Red wine is fined by adding broken

  eggshells or bull’s blood,

  but does not taste of the animal traveled through it.

  Cold leather of fog on the day, then only the day,

  cleared and simple,

  whose windows lift equally into what light happens.

  The dog asks to go out and you let her,

  age rough in her coat as stairs that keep no landing.

  The familiar is not safety.

  Yet a horse unblindered runs back to the shape it knows burning.

  THE LOST LOVE POEMS OF SAPPHO

  The poems we haven’t read

  must be her fiercest:

  imperfect, extreme.

  As it is with love, its nights, its days.

  It stands on the top of the mountain

  and looks for more mountain, steeper pitches.

  Descent a thought impossible to imagine.

  BUILDING AND EARTHQUAKE

  How easy it is for a dream to construct

  both building and earthquake.

  Also the nine flights of wooden stairs in the dark,

  and the trembling horse, its hard breathing

  loud in the sudden after-silence and starlight.

  This time the dream allows the building to stand.

  Something it takes the dreamer a long time to notice,

  who thought that the fear was the meaning

  when being able to feel the fear was the meaning.

  EACH WE CALL FATE

  What some could not have escaped

  others will find by decision.

  Each we call fate. Which Forgetfulness—

  sister of Memory—will take back.

  Not distinguishing necessity from choice,

  not weighing courage against betrayal or luck.

  “Did you then have your life?” the black crows will ask.

  “Scent of strong tea,” you may answer.

  “Color of swimming tuna, seen from below.

  Grounds of the palace illimitable with mice and rabbits.”

  THE VISIBLE HEAT

  Near even a candle, the visible heat.

  So it is with a person in love:

  buying bread, paying a bridge toll.

  You too have been that woman,

  the one who is looked at and the one who looks.

  Each lowers the eyes before it, without knowing why.

  SOMETIMES THE HEART IS A SHALLOW AUTUMN RIVER

  Is rock and shadow, bird.

  Is fry, as the smallest fish are called,

  darting in the pan of nearness.

  The frog’s flawless interpretation of the music “Leaf”

  is a floating black-eyed emerald

  slipped between the water and its reflections.

  And caution, and hope, and sorrow?

  As umbrellas are, to a mountain or field of grass.

  LOVE IN AUGUST

  White moths

  against the screen

  in August darkness.

  Some clamor

  in envy.

  Some spread large

  as two hands

  of a thief

  who wants to put

  back in your cupboard

  the long-taken silver.

  TWO RAINS

  The dog came in

  and shook off

  water in every direction.

  A chaotic rainstorm,

  walking on four big paws.

  The outside rain

  fell straight,

  in parallel lines

  from a child’s drawing.

  Windless, blunt, and cold,

  that orderly rain,

  like a fate

  uninterrupted by late love.

  WASHING DOORKNOBS

  The glass doorknobs turn no differently.

  But every December

  I polish them with vinegar water and cotton.

  Another year ends.

  This one, I ate Kyoto pickles

  and touched, in Xi’an, a stone turtle’s face,

  cold as stone, as turtle.

  I could not read the fortune carved into its shell

  or hear what it had raised its head

  to listen for, such a long time.

  Around it, the madness of empires continued,

  an unbitted horse that runs for a thousand miles

  between grazing.

  Around us, the madness of empires continues.

  How happy we are,

  how unhappy we are, doesn’t matter.

  The stone turtle listens. The famished horse runs.

  Washing doorknobs, one year enters another.

  CHAPEL

  The moonlight builds its cold chapel

  again out of piecemeal darkness.

  You who have ears and hands, it says, come in;

  no need to stamp the snow-weight from your shoes.

  It lifts another block and begins to chisel:

  Kyoto, Vladivostok, Chicago, Beijing, Perth.

  Huge-handed, working around you in silence,

  as a cat will enter the silence where no dog lives.

  TOLSTOY AND THE SPIDER

  Moscow is burning.

  Pierre sets out to kill Napoléon

  and instead rescues a child.

  Thus Tolstoy came today

  to lift this spider in his large hand

  and carry her free.

  Now a cricket approaches the spider

  set down inside her new story,

  one hind leg missing.

  The insects touch, a decision is made,

  each moves away from the other

  as if two exhausted and unprovisioned armies,

  as if two planets passing out of conjunction,

  or two royal cou
rts in procession,

  neither willing to note the other’s passage.

  Or like my own two legs:

  their narrow lifetime of coming together and parting.

  A story travels in one direction only,

  no matter how often

  it tries to turn north, south, east, west, back.

  FOR THE LOBARIA, USNEA, WITCHES HAIR, MAP LICHEN, BEARD LICHEN, GROUND LICHEN, SHIELD LICHEN

  Back then, what did I know?

  The names of subway lines, busses.

  How long it took to walk twenty blocks.

  Uptown and downtown.

  Not north, not south, not you.

  When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air,

  you were gray-green, incomprehensible, old.

  What you clung to, hung from: old.

  Trees looking half-dead, stones.

  Marriage of fungi and algae,

  chemists of air,

  changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.

  Like those nameless ones

  who kept painting, shaping, engraving

  unseen, unread, unremembered.

  Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.

  Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust,

  ash-of-the-woods.

  Transformers unvalued, uncounted.

  Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in.

  SWEATER

  What is asked of one is not what is asked of another.

  A sweater takes on the shape of its wearer,

  a coffee cup sits to the left or the right of the workspace,

  making its pale Saturn rings of now and before.

  Lucky the one who rises to sit at a table,

  day after day spilling coffee sweet with sugar, whitened with milk.

  Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings

  a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking, warmed by thick wool.

  Lucky still, the one who writes later, shaking. Acrobatic at last, the sweater,

  elastic as breath that enters what shape it is asked to.

  Patient the table; unjudging, the ample, refillable cup.

  Irrefusable, the shape the sweater is given,

  stretched in the shoulders, sleeves lengthened by unmetaphysical pullings on.

  SEAWATER STIFFENS CLOTH

  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.

  THE INVENTIVE, VISIBLE HOBBLES

  The inventive, visible hobbles,

  the cigarette, the battery,

  the board.

  What is done

  is done through the body.

  What can be stopped

  is stopped with the body.

  Yet an innocent elbow and fist,

  ankle and foot,

  touch the innocent shoulders and spine,

  anus and breasts of others.

  An innocent tongue,

  licking innocent air as it speaks,

  gives orders to hands

  that could be slipping the skin from a peach.

  Loud beyond hearing,

  a hell where physical flames

  might interrogate an apprehendable spirit,

  its thighbone and cheekbone.

  But no.

  The crime goes free.

  It dies with the dictator’s head on a downy pillow.

  “Haofon Rece Swealg”

  Batteries,

  yellow trucks hauling garbage,

  ampicillin, napalm.

  These too will be

  replaced by the not-yet-imagined.

  The engines of diesel

  will silence,

  joining the engines of steam,

  the brayings of mule.

  And still the poetry of ancient Sumeria

  will be understood with ease—

  humiliation,

  ambition,

  slaughter,

  the cutting down of the tallest cedar—

  and Beowulf’s verdict yet hold:

  Technologies alter.

  Heaven swallows the smoke.

  SHADOW: AN ASSAY

  Mostly we do not think of, even see you,

  shadow,

  for your powers at first seem few.

  Why command “Heel,” ask “Sit,”

  when before the thought is conceived,

  you are already there?

  True that sometimes you run ahead, sometimes behind,

  that early and late,

  to you, must be words of the deepest poignance:

  while inside them, you are larger than you were.

  Midday drives you to reticence, sulking,

  a silence

  I’ve felt many times inside me as well.

  You came with me to Kraków, Glasgow, Corfu.

  Did you enjoy them?

                           I never asked.

  Though however close my hand came to the table,

  you were closer, touching before my tongue

  the herring and cheeses, the turpentine-scented retsina.

  Many times I have seen you sacrifice yourself

  without hesitation,

  disentangling yourself like Anna Karenina from her purse

  before passing under the train wheels of her own thoughts.

  Like art, though, you are resilient: you rose again.

  Are you then afterlife, clutterless premonition?

  You shake your head as soon as I do—

  no, we think not.

  Whatever earth I will vanish silently into, you also will join.

  You carry, I have read,

  my rages, fears, and self-regard.

  You carry, I have read, my unrevealed longings,

  and the monster dreamed as a child, tongueless and armless.

  Your ordinary loneliness I recognize too as my own.

  When you do not exist,

  I have gone with you into darkness,

  as the self of a former life

  goes into the self that was tortured and beaten

  and does not emerge again as it was,

  though given a clean shirt to leave in, given pants and new shoes.

  For this too is shadow, and mine,

  however unspoken:

  though you are tongueless, and armless, you harm.

  Your inaction my own deepest failure, close by my side.

  You who take nothing, give nothing, instruct me,

  that my fate may weigh more than yours—

  The hour is furious, late.

  Your reach, horizontal, distant, leans almost forgiving,

  almost indistinguishable from what it crosses.

  THE QUESTION

  I tried to ask my dead—

  they answered as always.

  I tried to ask the black resourceful ants.

  The redwoods swayed

  in the honeys of branch-light.

  The moored boats shuffled their hulls.

  Across the water, the city’s windows glittered,

  a fastness.

  The gelding’s breath passed over and out of my hand.

  And so I came to turn again to you,

  my min
eral sadness.

  To look you eye to open eye. To wait.

  ALL DAY THE DIFFICULT WAITING

  All day the difficult waiting.

  “Continuance” repeating itself inside the ears,

  as if a verb, or choice.

  As if Levin during his long spring in Anna Karenina—

  reading and suffering

  because he could not understand what he read or suffered.

  Planting and mowing what was outside him.

  The heart’s actions

  are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.

  Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.

  One bird singing back to another because it can’t not.

  WILD PLUM

  A gray squirrel tests each plum with his nose,

  moving from one to another

  until he feasts.

  It is like watching the ego,

  moving from story to story.

  A man is proud of his strong brown teeth,

  though all his children have died.

  This tree the one he was given,

  its small, sustaining fruit, some green, some yellow.

  Pits drop to the ground,

  a little moistness clings in the scorings.