The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield Page A

crow scent enters the leaves, enters the bark,
    like stirred-in honey gone into the tea.
    How rarely I have stopped to thank
    the steady effort of the world to stay the world.
    To thank the furnish of green
    and abandon of yellow. The ancient Sumerians
    called the beloved “Honey,” as we do.
    Said also, “Borrowed bread is not returned.”
    Like them, we pay love’s tax to bees,
    we go on arranging the old notes in different orders.
    Desire inside A C A G G A T.
    Forgiveness in G T A C T T.
    In a world of space and time, arrangement matters.
    An hour has no front or back,
    except to those whose eyes face forward,
    whose tears blur thought and stars.
    Five genes, in a certain arrangement,
    will spend this life unrooted, grazing.
    It has to do with how the animal body comes into being,
    the same whether ant or camel.
    What then does such unfolded code understand,
    if it finds in its mouth the word important —
    the thing that can be carried, or the thing that cannot,
    or the way they keep trading places,
    grief and gladness, the comic, the glum, the dead, the living.
    Last night, the big Sumerian moon
    clambered into the house empty-handed
    and left empty-handed,
    not thief, not lover, not tortoise, just looking around,
    shuffling its soft, blind slippers over the floor.
    This felt, to me, important, and so I looked back with both hands
    open, palms unblinking.
    What caused the fire, we ask, meaning, lightning, wiring, matches.
    How precisely and unbidden
    oxygen slips itself into, between those thick words.

A S A H AMMER S PEAKS TO A N AIL
    When all else fails,
    fail boldly,
    fail with conviction,
    as a hammer speaks to a nail,
    or a lamp left on in daylight.
    Say one.
    If two does not follow,
    say three , if that fails, say life ,
    say future.
    Lacking future ,
    try bucket ,
    lacking iron , try shadow.
    If shadow too fails,
    if your voice falls and falls and keeps falling,
    meets only air and silence,
    say one again,
    but say it with greater conviction,
    as a nail speaks to a picture,
    as a hammer left on in daylight.

I S AT IN THE S UN
    I moved my chair into sun
    I sat in the sun
    the way hunger is moved when called fasting.

O F A MPLITUDE T HERE I S N O S CRAPING B OTTOM
    In certain styles of Chinese painting,
    three diagonal brushstrokes balance a mountain.
    Like that, the word for happiness
    keeps inside it the word for chance. For haplessness, also.
    You wanted to be ignorant, unknowing, thunderstruck, gobsmacked.
    Wanted to be brought to your knees
    by the scent of mushrooms you couldn’t know whether to pick.
    When the violent, brilliant goshawk,
    excessive and unforgiving, drove you from her nesting,
    she battered your head with its own blunt weight of animal being.
    The big, deaf bear in both lanes of the dark
    was a grandmother’s fake pearl necklace suddenly real.
    You ate the stories of others
    because your own were already inside you and you were still hungry.
    You wanted to sleep in a house you could walk the outside of,
    windowed and simple, and find on it one day a door—
    green-peeling, padlocked—you’d never guessed at.
    You found the house, you entered, ate there, slept.
    But however you rummaged and plundered the inside,
    that door, that blind-hinged door, kept opening elsewhere.

T HE O NE N OT C HOSEN
    Third sister,
    aunt one forgets to send a card to.
    Boy on a bench, second smallest,
    not quick, not precise, not cunning.
    Culled chick, branch-bruised peach,
    chair wobbly, unused, set in a corner.
    For some, almost good, almost lucky
    not to be chosen,
    though equally accidental—
    the thirty-year-buried land mine
    chooses the leg of another.
    (How the mouth struggles
    to say it: lucky, good.)
    Most are not chosen, most mostly watch.
    So it must be.
    The watched
    (not escaping pride, not truly minding)
    bemoan their responsibilities,
    so many anxieties, demands, complications.
    And still: any rabbit the center
    of its own rabbit world,
    its universe axis a nest of tamped-down grasses.
    It