Special Orders : Poems Hardcover - 2008

Branch Library

I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy
who perched in the branches of the old branch library.

He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks
and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor,

pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching
notes under his own corner patch of sky.

I'd give anything to find that birdy boy again
bursting out into the dusky blue afternoon

with his satchel of scrawls and scribbles,
radiating heat, singing with joy.



A Few Encounters With My Face

1
Who is that moonlit stranger staring at me
through the fog of a bathroom mirror

2
Wrinkles form a parenthesis around the eyes
dry wells of sadness at three a.m.

3
The forehead furrows in a scowl
a question mark puzzled since childhood

4
Faint scrawl of chickenpox and measles
broken asthma nights breathing steam

5
Hair thinning like his grandfather’s
all those bald ancestral thoughts

6
The nose a ram’s horn a scroll
as long and bumpy as the centuries

7
Greed of a Latvian horse thief
surprised by the lights

8
Primitive double chin divided in two
a mother and father divorcing

9
Deep red pouches and black bags
a life given to sleeplessness

10
Earnest grooves ironic blotches secret scars
memories medallions of middle age

11
It would take a Cubist to paint
this dark face splitting in three directions

12
Identify these features with rapture and despair
one part hilarity two parts grief



Charades

We waited on two sides of the subway tracks:
you were riding uptown and I was heading downtown
to a different apartment, after all these years.

We were almost paralyzed, as anxious
travelers surged around us in waves,
and then you started to pantomime.

First, you touched your right eye.
Then you palmed your left knee.
Finally, you pointed at me.

I made of a sign of understanding
back to you but the train suddenly roared
into the station and you disappeared.

“Hirsch summons the past and holds it like a stone in his palm . . . It is possibly the most triumphant kind of mourning, that which holds that things gone by are not lost, only transformed.” —The Pedestal Magazine (online)

“A chronicle of the triumphs and failings of life . . . supersaturated with his delightful, instructive allusions to the greats of yore.” —New York


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Edward Hirsch is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including "Wild Gratitude," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published four prose books, among them "How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, "a national best seller. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, and publishes regularly in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including "The""American Poetry Review" and "The New Yorker." A longtime teacher in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, he is now the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in New York City.