Without Night-Shoes
- Without Night-Shoes
All night,sonatas played left handed,inside a loaned iPod.
Neither sleeping nor waking,I walked their unshod stairways,up and then down.
On some blackboard inside the house,the word fearvanished.
On some blackboard inside the house,the word far vanished.
Then the word error, then or.
Grave and slender,those hours unhoured themselves,stair by stair vanished.
C minor, E flat, F sharp, A sharp erased them. [End Page 601]
Jane Hirshfield
jane hirshfield’s most recent books are The Beauty, long-listed for the National Book Award, and a collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
