Saturday, November 5, 2011

The Morning Reading: "The old fineness in him hangs on"


The Pear
- Jane Hirshfield

November. One pear
sways on the tree past leaves, past reason.
In the nursing home, my friend has fallen.
Chased, he said, from the freckled woods
by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais.
Delusion too, it seems, can be well read.
He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread.
The old fineness in him hangs on
for dear life. “My mind now?
A small ship under the wake of a large.
They force you to walk on your heels here,
the angles matter. Four or five degrees,
and you’re lost.” Life is dear to him yet,
though he believes it his own fault he grieves,
his own fault his old friends have turned against him
like crows against an injured of their kind.
There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy.
Descend, descend,
some voice must urge, inside the pear stem.
The argument goes on, he cannot outrun it.
Dawnlight to dawnlight, I look: it is still there.

*

2 comments:

Dean Keller said...

thanks Lisa. It so well describes my fathers journey. Difficult to watch as I hung on to the what was passed, yet imbued with a lovely delicate beauty of its own.

"the old fineness hangs on"

Anonymous said...

It was my birthday today (Nov. 5) Ten years more, and I will be the age of my mother when she died. A kind of deadline looms: heralding what?

 
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