Ledger by Jane Hirshfield

Author:Jane Hirshfield [Hirshfield, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

INTERRUPTION: AN ASSAY

Sometimes you took the shape

of an unseen mosquito,

sometimes of illness.

Presumed most of the time to be passing,

yet importunate as a toddler

who demanded her own way,

as a phone that would not stop ringing long after it should.

Unignorable pavement slap of the gone-flat tire.

All afternoon the thunder was interrupted by sunshine.

All night the rain was interrupted by trees and roofs.

And still, as rusting steel is uninterrupted by dryness

and hunger uninterrupted by sleep,

interruption and non-interruption sat in the day’s container

as salt sits in milk, one whiteness disguised by another.

As a fish in a tank is interrupted by glass, and turns,

a person’s fate is to continue

despite,

until.

Death: an interruption not passing,

weighing

one hundred and fifty-eight pounds,

carried on cut plywood with yellow straps.

Birth: an interruption between

two windows,

trying to think of any joke, any tune, that is new.

Between them:

this navigation by echolocation and lidar,

the weathers of avalanche, earthquake, tsunami,

firestorm, drought;

a moment that sets down—gently, sleepily—its half-read novel

on a bedside table whose side turned toward the wall stays unpainted,

confident the story will be there again come morning.

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