My Eyes
An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.
Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.
Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.
My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.
_______
I Wake Early
I wake early,
make two cups of coffee,
drink one,
think, go back to sleep,
wake again, think,
drink the other.
To start a day over
is a card game played for no money,
a ripe tomato,
a swimming cat.
Time here:
lukewarm,
with milk and sugar,
big and unset as a table.
I wake twice.
Twice the window
unbroken, transparent.
Twice the cat’s nose and ears above water.
Twice the war (my war)
is distant,
its children’s children are distant.
_______
Zero Plus Anything Is a World
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.
Excerpted from The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.