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French Horn

Jane Hirshfield

For a few days only,
the plum tree outside the window
shoulders perfection.
No matter the plums will be small,
eaten only by squirrels and jays.
I feast on the one thing, they on another,
the shoaling bees on a third.
What in this unpleated world isn’t someone’s seduction?
The boy playing his intricate horn in Mahler’s Fifth,
in the gaps between playing,
turns it and turns it, dismantles a section,
shakes from it the condensation
of human passage. He is perhaps twenty.
Later he takes his four bows, his face deepening red,
while a girl holds a viola’s spruce wood and maple
in one half-opened hand and looks at him hard.
Let others clap.
These two, their ears still ringing, hear nothing.
Not the shouts of bravo, bravo,
not the timpanic clamor inside their bodies.
As the plum’s blossoms do not hear the bee
not taste themselves turned into storable honey
by that sumptuous disturbance.


Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief (Bloodaxe Books, 2012)

Reproduced by permission of the author and the publisher.

Tags:

American poetry falling in love fruit musical instruments pleasure spring
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Jane Hirshfieldb.1953

Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven books of poetry, including the recently published Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011, Bloodaxe, 2012) and a now-classic collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997). Bloodaxe has also brought...
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