A poem sent in by Marshall

[msan...@gmail.com]

Here is a poem sent in by Marshall Ganz one of our small poem group
members. This is by the inestimable., Jane Hirshfield. Even if we do
not live in a time when poets are celebrated and supported ( I was
looking for the 1% of the stimulus package that would go directly to
put artists of all kind to work and failed to find it. Just another
allotment and small at that to the NEA) , we are blessed to live in a
time of an amazing number of wonderful poets at work. Jane Hirshfield
is another one of those.
Yrs
Michael


French Horn

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
nor taste themselves turned into storable honey
by that sumptuous disturbance.

Jane Hirshfield