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Overview
Ledger's pages hold the most important work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw"), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments.
They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider "the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap," recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty.
Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems by a "modern master" (The Washington Post).
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781524711719 |
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Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 09/07/2021 |
Pages: | 128 |
Sales rank: | 340,290 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
LET THEM NOT SAY
Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something:
A kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.
THE BOWL
If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.
If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.
If a shoe is put into the bowl,
the leather is chewed and chewed over,
a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten.
A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl.
Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness,
it eats them.
Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry.
The bowl cannot be thrown away.
It cannot be broken.
It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless,
and, big though it seems, fits exactly in two human hands.
Hands with ten fingers,
fifty-four bones,
capacities strange to us almost past measure.
Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—
with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.
I WANTED TO BE SURPRISED.
To such a request, the world is obliging.
In just the past week, a rotund porcupine,
who seemed equally startled by me.
The man who swallowed a tiny microphone to record the sounds of his body,
not considering beforehand how he might remove it.
A cabbage and mustard sandwich on marbled bread.
How easily the large spiders were caught with a clear plastic cup surprised even them.
I don’t know why I was surprised every time love started or ended.
Or why each time a new fossil, Earth-like planet, or war.
Or that no one kept being there when the doorknob had clearly.
What should not have been so surprising:
my error after error, recognized when appearing on the faces of others.
What did not surprise enough:
my daily expectation that anything would continue,
and then that so much did continue, when so much did not.
Small rivulets still flowing downhill when it wasn’t raining.
A sister’s birthday.
Also, the stubborn, courteous persistence.
That even today please means please,
good morning is still understood as good morning,
and that when I wake up,
the window’s distant mountain remains a mountain,
the borrowed city around me is still a city, and standing.
Its alleys and markets, offices of dentists,
drug store, liquor store, Chevron.
Its library that charges—a happy surprise—no fine for overdue books:
Borges, Baldwin, Szymborska, Morrison, Cavafy.
VEST
I put on again the vest of many pockets.
It is easy to forget which holds the reading glasses,
which the small pen,
which the house keys,
the compass and whistle, the passport.
To forget at last for weeks even the pocket holding the day of digging a place for my sister’s ashes,
the one holding the day where someone will soon enough put my own.
To misplace the pocket of touching the walls at Auschwitz would seem impossible.
It is not.
To misplace, for a decade,
the pocket of tears.
I rummage and rummage—
transfers for Munich, for Melbourne,
to Oslo.
A receipt for a Singapore kopi.
A device holding music:
Bach, Garcia, Richter, Porter, Pärt.
A woman long dead now gave me, when I told her I could not sing,
a kazoo.
Now in a pocket.
Somewhere, a pocket holding a Steinway.
Somewhere, a pocket holding a packet of salt.
Borgesian vest,
Oxford English Dictionary vest with a magnifying glass tucked inside one snapped-closed pocket,
Wikipedia vest, Rosetta vest,
Enigma vest of decoding,
how is it one person can carry your weight for a lifetime,
one person slip into your open arms for a lifetime?
Who was given the world,
and hunted for tissues, for chapstick.
AN ARCHAEOLOGY
Sixty feet below the streets of Rome,
the streets of Rome.
Like that, I heard your voice, my life.
Like that I listened.
I listened as to neighbors who live behind the back wall of a building.
You know the voices of them,
the arguments and re-knittings,
the scents of their cooking and absence.
You know their plosives, gutturals, fricatives, stops.
Say to any who walk here,
“How are you?”
Ask where some bar or café might be found.
You could talk together, and drink,
and find your own neighbor.
But ask your life anything, ask it,
“How did this happen? What have we come to?”
It turns its face, it hums as a fish-hiding sea does.
FECIT
for a person in love, the air looks no different
for a person in grief
in this my one lifetime,
while reading, arguing, cherishing, washing, watching a video,
sleeping,
the numbers unseeably rise—
305 ppm, 317 ppm, 390, 400
shin of high granite ticks snow-less the compound fracture
I who wrote this
like the old painters sign this:
JH fecit.
DAY BEGINNING WITH SEEING THE INTERNATIONAL
SPACE STATION AND A FULL MOON OVER THE
GULT OF MEXICO AND ALL ITS INVISIBLE FISHES
None of this had to happen.
Not Florida. Not the ibis’s beak. Not water.
Not the horseshoe crab’s empty body and not the living starfish.
Evolution might have turned left at the corner and gone down another street entirely.
The asteroid might have missed.
The seams of limestone need not have been susceptible to sand and mangroves.
The radio might have found a different music.
The hips of one man and the hips of another might have stood beside each other on a bus in Aleppo and recognized themselves as long-lost brothers.
The key could have broken off in the lock and the nail-can refused its lid.
I might have been the fish the brown pelican swallowed.
You might have been the way the moon kept not setting long after we thought it would,
long after the sun was catching inside the low wave curls coming in at a certain angle. The light might not have been eaten again by its moving.
If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief of what hasn’t changed yet. Across the world a man pulls a woman from the water from which the leapt-from overfilled boat has entirely vanished.
From the water pulls one child, another. Both are living and both will continue to live.
This did not have to happen. No part of this had to happen.
AS IF HEARING HEAVY FURNITURE MOVED ON THE
FLOOR ABOVE US
As things grow rarer, they enter the ranges of counting.
Remain this many Siberian tigers,
that many African elephants. Three hundred red-legged egrets.
We scrape from the world its tilt and meander of wonder as if eating the last burned onions and carrots from a cast-iron pan.
Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness.
Table of Contents
Let Them Not Say 3
The Bowl 7
I wanted to be surprised 8
Vest 10
An Archaeology 12
Fecit 13
Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes 14
As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us 15
Description 16
Ants' Nest 17
A Bucket Forgets Its Water 18
Questionnaire 19
You Go to Sleep in One Room and Wake in Another 21
Chance darkened me 22
Some Questions 23
Today, Another Universe 25
The Orphan Beauty of Fold Not Made Blindfold 26
Now a Darkness Is Coming 29
Words 30
Homs 31
She Breathes in the Scent 32
A Folding Screen 33
Practice 34
Cataclysm 35
Paint 36
Heels 37
Cold, Clear 38
Capital: An Assay 39
Falcon 41
Spell to Be Said Against Hatred 42
Advice to Myself 45
Notebook 46
In Ulvik 47
O Snail 48
Branch 49
Without Night-Shoes 50
The Bird Net 51
Corals, Coho, Coelenterates 52
To My Fifties 53
Brocade 54
Interruption: An Assay 55
My Doubt 57
My Contentment 59
My Hunger 60
My Longing 61
My Dignity 62
My Glasses 64
My Wonder 65
My Silence 66
A Ream of Paper 69
Lure 70
A Moment Knows Itself Penultimate 71
Bluefish 73
Almond, Rabbit 74
The Paw-Paw 75
Musa Paradisiaca 76
It Was as if a Ladder 77
Like Others 79
Husband 80
Wild Turkeys 81
Nine Pebbles 82
Without Blinking 82
Like That Other-Hand Music 82
Retrospective 82
Library Book with Many Precisely Turned-Down Corners 83
Now Even More 83
Haiku: Monadnock 83
A Strategy 84
Sixth Extinction 84
Obstacle 84
They Have Decided 85
Things Seem Strong 86
Dog Tag 87
Biophilia 88
Amor Fati 91
Snow 92
Kitchen 93
Harness 94
Rust Flakes on Wind 95
Pelt 96
Wood. Salt. Tin 97
I Said 98
Ledger 101
In a Former Coal Mine in Silesia 102
Engraving: World-Tree with an Empty Beehive on One Branch 103
(No Wind, No Rain) 104
On the Fifth Day 105
Page 107
My Confession 109
Chazal for the End of Time 110
Mountainal 111
My Debt 112
Acknowledgments 115