Mathematics

By Jane Hirshfield b. 1953 Jane Hirshfield

I have envied those

who make something

useful, sturdy—

a chair, a pair of boots.

Even a soup,

rich with potatoes and cream.

Or those who fix, perhaps,

a leaking window:

strip out the old cracked putty,

lay down cleanly the line of the new.

You could learn,

the mirror tells me, late at night,

but lacks conviction.

One reflected eyebrow quivers a little.

I look at this

borrowed apartment—

everywhere I question it,

the wallpaper’s pattern matches.

Yesterday a woman

showed me

a building shaped

like the overturned hull of a ship,

its roof trusses, under the plaster,

lashed with soaked rawhide,

the columns’ marble

painted to seem like wood.

Though possibly it was the other way around?

I look at my unhandy hand,

innocent,

shaped as the hands of others are shaped.

Even the pen it holds is a mystery, really.

Rawhide, it writes,

and chair, and marble.

Eyebrow.

Later the woman asked me—

I recognized her then,

my sister, my own young self—

Does a poem enlarge the world,

or only our idea of the world?

How do you take one from the other,

I lied, or did not lie,

in answer.

Source: Given Sugar Given Salt (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2001)

Biography

Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of several collections of verse, including Come, Thief (2011), After (2006), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize, and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, among others. Hirshfield has also translated the work of early women poets in collections such as The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi . . .

Continue reading this biography