In Praise of Coldness

"If you wish to move your reader,"
Chekhov wrote, "you must write more coldly."

Herakleitos recommended, "A dry soul is best."

And so at the center of many great works
is found a preserving dispassion,
like the vanishing point of quattrocento perspective,
or the tiny packets of desiccant enclosed
in a box of new shoes or seeds.

But still the vanishing point
is not the painting,
the silica is not the blossoming plant.

Chekhov, dying, read the timetables of trains.
To what more earthly thing could he have been faithful? -
Scent of rocking distances,
smoke of blue trees out the window,
hampers of bread, pickled cabbage, boiled meat.

Scent of the knowable journey.

Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

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by Jane Hirshfield, 2005

Peaches

A crate of peaches straight from the farm
has to be maintained, or eaten in days.
Obvious, but in my family, they went so fast,
I never saw the mess that punishes delay.

I thought everyone bought fruit by the crate,
stored it in the coolest part of the house,
then devoured it before any could rot.
I'm from the Peach State, and to those

who ask But where are you from originally,
I'd like to reply The homeland of the peach,
but I'm too nice, and they might not look it up.
In truth, the reason we bought so much

did have to do with being Chinese - at least
Chinese in that part of America, both strangers
and natives on a lonely, beautiful street
where food came in stackable containers

and fussy bags, unless you bothered to drive
to the source, where the same money landed
a bushel of fruit, a twenty-pound sack of rice.
You had to drive anyway, each house surrounded

by land enough to grow your own, if lawns
hadn't been required. At home I loved to stare
into the extra freezer, reviewing mountains
of foil-wrapped meats, cakes, juice concentrate,

mysterious packets brought by houseguests
from New York Chinatown, to be transformed
by heat, force, and my mother's patient effort,
enough to keep us fed through flood or storm,

provided the power stayed on, or fire and ice
could be procured, which would be labor-intensive,
but so was everything else my parents did.
Their lives were labor, they kept this from the kids,

who grew up to confuse work with pleasure,
to become typical immigrants' children,
taller than their parents and unaware of hunger
except when asked the odd, perplexing question.

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by Adrienne Su, 2015

Landscape

Time passed, turning everything to ice.

Under the ice, the future stirred.

If you fell into it, you died.

It was a time

of waiting, of suspended action.

I lived in the present, which was

that part of the future you could see.

The past floated above my head,

like the sun and moon, visible but never reachable.

It was a time

governed by contradictions, as in

I felt nothing and

I was afraid.

Winter emptied the trees, filled them again with snow.

Because I couldn't feel, snow fell, the lake froze over.

Because I was afraid, I didn't move;

my breath was white, a description of silence.

Time passed, and some of it became this.

And some of it simply evaporated;

you could see it float above the white trees

forming particles of ice.

All your life, you wait for the propitious time.

Then the propitious time

reveals itself as action taken.

I watched the past move, a line of clouds moving

from left to right or right to left,

depending on the wind. Some days

there was no wind. The clouds seemed

to stay where they where,

like a painting of the sea, more still than real.

Some days the lake was a sheet of glass.

Under the glass, the future made

demure, inviting sounds;

you had to tense yourself so as not to listen.

Time passed; you got to see a piece of it.

The years it took with it were years of winter;

they would not be missed. Some days

there were no clouds, as though

the sources of the past had vanished. The world

was bleached, like a negative; the light passed

directly through it. Then

the image faded.

Above the world

there was only blue, blue everywhere.

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by Louise Gluck, 2003

The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access to the perfection of the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself in summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

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by Wallace Stevens, 1947

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

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by Denise Levertov, 1966