Authors: Edward Hirsch
I escaped from the celestial power
of that light and paused beside a young girl
sponging her neck, two courtesans
powdering their shoulders with talc,
kimonos gathered at their waists.
Their lips were the color of plums,
their eyes were as shiny as porcelain.
I heard lightning exploding in the distance,
a branch cracking somewhere in my mind, rain
and sleet washing across the tented willows.
The wind gusted through the wet leaves.
And suddenly I found myself staring
at the stark, inky gray profile
of an emaciated horse:
gaunt and bony, half-starved, a shrunken
towering remnant of a once-splendid body,
that horse was someone I could know, someone
that I had already known for a long time.
It was drawn on a faded handscroll
by Kung K’ai, a familiar of emperors,
“a strangely isolated man”
who had become an
i-min
,
a pariah, a late survivor—
like his horse—from an earlier dynasty.
This was the same artist who had once drawn
large, fearsome creatures racing furiously
through the countryside with their nostrils
smoking and their warlike black eyes
blazing in anger, their coarse manes
flying in the mountain wind—
and I kept trying to imagine him
kneeling on the dirt floor of a one-room house
patiently spreading out a paper scroll
on the back of his eldest son, carefully
drawing the slow, torturous outline
of a starving horse, a dying
horse against a vacant background.
One gray horse and nothing else.
I had seen that stark creature before;
I recognized its harsh, inhuman profile.
And then I was seven years old again.
I was in the city with my grandmother
buying Christmas gifts for my parents
and the emaciated horse—
yoked tightly to a gilded carriage
of wealthy, laughing tourists—
was standing next to us on the crowded
street corner, waiting for a traffic light.
The city was wearing its brightest colors,
but all I could see was the woeful figure
of a horse, a gaunt survivor
from a previous dynasty,
waiting for the light to change,
for the tourists to dismount,
for the taxis to start moving again,
for the intolerable burden of its life to stop.
Out here in the exact middle of the day,
This strange, gawky house has the expression
Of someone being stared at, someone holding
His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;
This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed
Of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.
But the man behind the easel is relentless;
He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes
The house must have done something horrible
To the people who once lived here
Because now it is so desperately empty,
It must have done something to the sky
Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant
And devoid of meaning. There are no
Trees or shrubs anywhere—the house
Must have done something against the earth.
All that is present is a single pair of tracks
Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.
Now the stranger returns to this place daily
Until the house begins to suspect
That the man, too, is desolate, desolate
And even ashamed. Soon the house starts
To stare frankly at the man. And somehow
The empty white canvas slowly takes on
The expression of someone who is unnerved,
Someone holding his breath underwater.
And then one day the man simply disappears.
He is a last afternoon shadow moving
Across the tracks, making its way
Through the vast, darkening fields.
This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,
The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky,
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.
At this hour the soul floats weightlessly
through the city streets, speechless and invisible,
astonished by the smoky blend of grays and golds
seeping out of the air, the dark half-tones
of dusk already filling the cloudy sky
while the body sits listlessly by the window
sullen and heavy, too exhausted to move,
too weary to stand up or to lie down.
At this hour the soul is like a yellow wing
slipping through the treetops, a little ecstatic
cloud hovering over the sidewalks, calling out
to the approaching night, “Amaze me, amaze me,”
while the body sits glumly by the window
listening to the clear summons of the dead
transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal.…
Some nights it is almost ready to join them.
Oh, this is a strained, unlikely tethering,
a furious grafting of the quick and the slow:
when the soul flies up, the body sinks down
and all night—locked in the same cramped room—
they go on quarreling, stubbornly threatening
to leave each other, wordlessly filling the air
with the sound of a low internal burning.
How long can this bewildering marriage last?
At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire
of stars flaming on the other side of the sky,
but the body stares into an empty night sheen,
a hollow-eyed darkness. Poor luckless angels,
feverish old loves: don’t separate yet.
Let what rises live with what descends.
Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,
And put my fingers into her clean cat’s mouth,
And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,
And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,
And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,
I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,
Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing
In every one of the splintered London streets,
And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke’s
With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude,
And his grave prayers for the other lunatics,
And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry.
All day today—August 13, 1983—I remembered how
Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759,
For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience.
This was the day that he blessed the Postmaster General
“And all conveyancers of letters” for their warm humanity,
And the gardeners for their private benevolence
And intricate knowledge of the language of flowers,
And the milkmen for their universal human kindness.
This morning I understood that he loved to hear—
As I have heard—the soft clink of milk bottles
On the rickety stairs in the early morning,
And how terrible it must have seemed
When even this small pleasure was denied him.
But it wasn’t until tonight when I knelt down
And slipped my hand into Zooey’s waggling mouth
That I remembered how he’d called Jeoffry “the servant
Of the Living God duly and daily serving Him,”
And for the first time understood what it meant.
Because it wasn’t until I saw my own cat
Whine and roll over on her fluffy back
That I realized how gratefully he had watched
Jeoffry fetch and carry his wooden cork
Across the grass in the wet garden, patiently
Jumping over a high stick, calmly sharpening
His claws on the woodpile, rubbing his nose
Against the nose of another cat, stretching, or
Slowly stalking his traditional enemy, the mouse,
A rodent, “a creature of great personal valour,”
And then dallying so much that his enemy escaped.
And only then did I understand
It is Jeoffry—and every creature like him—
Who can teach us how to praise—purring
In their own language,
Wreathing themselves in the living fire.
It must have been a night like this one,
Cool and transparent and somehow even-tempered,
Sitting on the friendly wooden porch of someone’s
Summer house in mid-October in the country
That my father, home from the Korean War
And still in uniform, wearing a pilot’s bars
And carrying a pilot’s stark memories (still
Fingering a parachute in the back of his mind)
Jumped from the front steps where he’d been sitting
And held a sweating gin and tonic in the air
Like a newly won trophy, and flushed and smiled
Into the eyes of a strangely willing camera.
It must have been winning to see him again
Safely home at the close of a vague war
That was too far away to imagine clearly,
A little guarded and shy, but keenly present,
Tall and solid and actual as ever, and anyway
Smiling past the camera at his high-school sweetheart
(Now his wife, mother of his two small children)
Surrounded by friends on a calm midwestern night.
It must have been so soothing to have him back
That no one studied him closely, no one noticed
That there was something askew, something
Dark and puzzling in his eyes, something deeply
Reluctant staring into the narrow, clear-eyed
Lens of the camera. I’ve imagined it all—
And tonight, so many light years afterwards,
Looking intently at a torn photograph
Of that young soldier, my distant first father,
Home from a war that he never once mentioned,
I can foresee the long winter of arguments
Ahead, the hard seasons of their divorce,
The furious battles in court, and beyond that,
The unexpected fire, the successive bankruptcies,
The flight to California with a crisp new bankroll,
The move to Arizona with a brand-new family.
Tonight the past seems as sharp and inevitable
As the moment in Indian Summer when you glance up
From a photograph album and discover the fireflies
Pulsing in the woods in front of the house
And the stars blackening in a thicket of clouds.…
It must have been a night like this one
When my mother glanced over her husband’s head
Into a cluster of trees emerging behind him
And heard the wind scraping against the branches
Like the
strop strop
of a razor on rawhide,
And saw the full moon rising between the clouds
And shattering into hundreds of glassy fragments.
Twelve years old and lovesick, bumbling
and terrified for the first time in my life,
but strangely hopeful, too, and stunned,
definitely stunned—I wanted to cry,
I almost started to sob when Chris Klein
actually touched me—oh God—below the belt
in the back row of the Skokie Theatre.
Our knees bumped helplessly, our mouths
were glued together like flypaper, our lips
were grinding in a hysterical grimace
while the most handsome man in the world
twitched his hips on the flickering screen
and the girls began to scream in the dark.
I didn’t know one thing about the body yet,
about the deep foam filling my bones,
but I wanted to cry out in desolation
when she touched me again, when the lights
flooded on in the crowded theatre
and the other kids started to file
into the narrow aisles, into a lobby
of faded purple splendor, into the last
Saturday in August before she moved away.
I never wanted to move again, but suddenly
we were being lifted toward the sidewalk
in a crush of bodies, blinking, shy,
unprepared for the ringing familiar voices
and the harsh glare of sunlight, the brightness
of an afternoon that left us gripping
each other’s hands, trembling and changed.
Now the city deepens in smoke,
now the darkness raises a withered hand
and the night begins, like a prelude,
in real earnest. This is the music