The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield Page B

looks out its ground-level eyes,
    is warm, is curious, hungry,
    its heart beats faster or slower
    with its own rabbit fate.
    A rabbit’s soul cannot help
    but choose its own ears, its own paws,
    its own startlement, sleepiness, longings,
    it has a rabbit allegiance,
    and the pink nose, which
    could have been drawn in charcoal
    by Dürer’s sister, but wasn’t,
    takes in its own warmth and fur-scent,
    glints pinkly,
    pinkly alters the distant star’s light
    in its own cuniculan corner
    among vast and unanswerable worlds,
    without even knowing it does so.

S NOW IN A PRIL
    “There, there,” the awkward uncle
    comforts
    the crying infant.
    “There, there,” he repeats,
    agreeing:
    Here, here is the only possible problem.
    Soon now, there and here
    will both move along,
    a lullaby about snow falling in a snowy pasture.

F EBRUARY 29
    An extra day—
    Like the painting’s fifth cow,
    who looks out directly,
    straight toward you,
    from inside her black and white spots.
    An extra day—
    Accidental, surely:
    the made calendar stumbling over the real
    as a drunk trips over a threshold
    too low to see.
    An extra day—
    With a second cup of black coffee.
    A friendly but businesslike phone call.
    A mailed-back package.
    Some extra work, but not too much—
    just one day’s worth, exactly.
    An extra day—
    Not unlike the space
    between a door and its frame
    when one room is lit and another is not,
    and one changes into the other
    as a woman exchanges a scarf.
    An extra day—
    Extraordinarily like any other.
    And still
    there is some generosity to it,
    like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.

T HREE M ORNINGS
    In Istanbul, my ears
    three mornings heard the early call to prayer.
    At fuller light, heard birds then,
    waterbirds and tree birds, birds of migration.
    Like three knowledges,
    I heard them: incomprehension,
    sweetened distance, longing.
    When the body dies, where will they go,
    those migrant birds and prayer calls,
    as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer?
    With voices of the ones I loved,
    great loves and small loves, train wheels,
    crickets, clock-ticks, thunder—where will they,
    when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?

A WAY FROM H OME , I T HOUGHT OF THE E XILED P OETS
    Away from home,
    I read the exiled poets—
    Ovid, Brecht.
    Then set my books that night
    near the foot of the bed.
    All night pretended they were the cat.
    Not once
    did I wake her.

A LL S OULS
    In Italy, on the day of the dead,
    they ring bells,
    from every church and village in every direction.
    At the usual times, the regular bells of the hour—
    eleven strokes, twelve. Oar strokes
    laid over and into the bottomless water and air.
    But the others? Tuneless, keyless,
    rhythm of wings at the door of the hive
    when the entrance is suddenly shuttered
    and the bees, returned heavy, see
    that the world of flowering and pollen is over.
    There can be no instruction
    to make this. Undimensioned
    the tongues of the bells,
    the ropes of the bells, their big iron bodies unholy.
    Barred from form, barred from bars,
    from relation. The beauty—unspeakable—
    was beauty. I drank it and thirsted,
    I stopped. I ran. Wanted closer in every direction.
    Each bell stroke released without memory
    or judgment, unviolent, untender. Uncaring.
    And yet: existent. Something trembling.
    I—who have not known bombardment—
    have never heard so naked a claim
    of the dead on the living, to know them.

I N S PACE
    In space
    (the experiment
    suggested by two fifth graders),
    a Canadian astronaut
    wrings water out of a towel.
    It stays by the towel,
    horizontal
    transparent isinglass,
    a hyaline column.
    Then begins to cover his hands,
    his wrists,
    stays on them
    until he passes it to another towel.
    On earth
    some who watch this
    recognize the wrung, irrational soul.
    How it does not leave
    but stays close,
    outside the cleaning twist-fate but close—
    fear   desire   anger
    joy   irritation
    mourning
    wet stuff
    that is shining, that