Jane Hirshfield - Come, Thief: Poems

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright 2011 by Jane Hirshfield
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hirshfield, Jane, 1953
Come, thief : poems / by Jane Hirshfield. cm.
A Borzoi Book.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59944-5
I. cm.
A Borzoi Book.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59944-5
I.

Title.
PS 3558. I 694 C 66 2011
811.54dc22 2010051493 Jacket photograph by Lane Coder/GalleryStockJacket design by Barbara de Wilde v3.1_r1 for Carl

For a few days only, the plum tree outside the window shoulders perfection. No matter the plums will be small, eaten only by squirrels and jays. I feast on the one thing, they on another, the shoaling bees on a third. What in this unpleated world isnt someones seduction? The boy playing his intricate horn in Mahlers Fifth, in the gaps between playing, turns it and turns it, dismantles a section, shakes from it the condensation of human passage. He is perhaps twenty.

Later he takes his four bows, his face deepening red, while a girl holds a violas spruce wood and maple in one half-opened hand and looks at him hard. Let others clap. These two, their ears still ringing, hear nothing. Not the shouts of bravo, bravo, not the timpanic clamor inside their bodies. As the plums blossoms do not hear the bee nor taste themselves turned into storable honey by that sumptuous disturbance.

1025 molecules are enough to call wood thrush or apple.

A hummingbird, fewer. A wristwatch: 1024. An alphabets molecules, tasting of honey, iron, and salt, cannot be counted as some strings, untouched, sound when a near one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us. It looked out face to face in every direction.

There is a moment before a shape hardens, a color sets. 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 rooms 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.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it. How fragile we are, between the few good moments. The tongue says loneliness, anger, grief, but does not feel them. The tongue says loneliness, anger, grief, but does not feel them.

As Monday cannot feel Tuesday, nor Thursday reach back to Wednesday as a mother reaches out for her found child. As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it. Not a bell, but the sound of the bell in the bell-shape, lashing full strength with the first blow from inside the iron.

For a dog, no news the wind brings is without interest. A boats hull does not travel last years waves. A lit window at night in the distance: idea almost graspable, finally not.

How many feet of skim milk does it take to shingle a lamppost? my friends teacher would ask him. Lightning, like luck, lands somewhere, my friend would reply. The feeling heart does not tire of carrying ballast. The members of one Siberian tribe spoke of good things in metaphor only: The gods are jealous, but stupid, they kindly explained. A lake-waters listing, this knowledge.

Like one man milking a billy goat, another holding a sieve beneath it, Kant wrote, quoting an unnamed ancient. Like one man milking a billy goat, another holding a sieve beneath it, Kant wrote, quoting an unnamed ancient.

It takes a moment to notice the sieve doesnt matter. In her nineties, a woman begins to sleepwalk. One morning finding pudding and a washed pot, another the opened drawers of her late husbands dresser. After a while, anything becomes familiar, though the Yiddish jokes of Auschwitz stumbled and failed outside the barbed wire. Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning, as wit increases distance and compassion erodes it. Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains.

A dog catching a tennis ball lobbed into darkness holds her breath silent, to keep the descent in her ears. The goat stands patient for two millennia, watching without judgment from behind his strange eyes.

Day after day, my neighbors cats in the garden. Each in a distant spot, like wary planets. One brindled gray, one black and white, one orange. They remind of the feelings: how one cannot know another completely.

The way two cats cannot sleep in one patch of mint-scented shade.

A snake with two small hind-limbs and pelvic girdle. Large-headed dinosaurs hunting in packs like dogs. Others whose scaly plates thistle to feathers. Mammals sleekening, ottering, simplified back toward the waters. Ours, too, a transitional species, chimerical, passing, what is later, always, called monstrous no longer one thing, not yet another.

Fossils greeting fossils, fearful, hopeful. Walking, sleeping, waking, wanting to live. Nuzzling our young wildly, as they did.

Best when the gods changed into rag and sandal, thinness, wrinkle, knocked, asked entrance. Such test is simple, can be passed or failed: The softest bed. The meat unstinting.

But when from far and mountain they would ask, and for amusement, What are mortals? even the flocking creatures came to tremble, cattle, sheep. Scentlesssilent then the distant slaughters, like toy armies in the hands of boys.

A muscular, thick-pelted woodchuck, created in yield, in abandon, lifts onto his haunches. Behind him, abundance of ferns, a rock walls coldness, never in sun, a few noisy grackles. Our eyes find shining beautiful because it reminds us of water. To say this does not make fewer the rooms of the house or lessen its zinc-ceilinged hallways.

There is something that waits inside us, a nearness that fissures, that fishes. Leaf shine and stone shine edging the tail of the woodchuck silver, splashing the legs of chickens and clouds. In Russian, the translator told me, there is no word for thirstya sentence, as always, impossible to translate. But what is the point of preserving the bell if to do so it must be filled with concrete or wax? A body prepared for travel but not for singing.

A woman moves close: there is something she wants to say. The currents take you one direction, her another.

All night you are aware of her presence, aware of the conversation that did not happen. Inside it are mountains, birds, a wide river, a few sparse-leaved trees. On the river, a wooden boat putters. On its deck, a spider washes its face. Years from now, the boat will reach a port by the sea, and the generations of spider descendants upon it will look out, from their nearsighted, eightfold eyes, at something unanswered.