Mathematics
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.
Copyright Credit: Jane Hirshfield, “Mathematics” from Given Sugar, Given Salt. Copyright © 2001 by Jane Hirshfield. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: Given Sugar Given Salt (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2001)