Portside

Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station And a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico and All its Invisible Fishes

By Jane Hirshfield

None of this had to happen.
Not Florida. Not the ibis’s beak. Not water.
Not the horseshoe crab’s empty body and not the living starfish.
Evolution might have turned left at the corner and gone down another street entirely.
The asteroid might have missed.
The seams of limestone need not have been susceptible to sand and mangroves.
The radio might have found a different music.
The hips of one man and the hips of another might have stood beside
each other on a bus in Aleppo and recognized themselves as long-lost brothers.
The key could have broken off in the lock and the nail-can refused its lid.
I might have been the fish the brown pelican swallowed.
You might have been the way the moon kept not setting long after we thought it would,
long after the sun was catching inside the low wave curls coming in
at a certain angle. The light might not have been eaten again by its moving.
If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief
of what hasn’t changed yet. Across the world a man pulls a woman from the water
from which the leapt-from overfilled boat has entirely vanished.
From the water pulls one child, another. Both are living and both will continue to live.
This did not have to happen. No part of this had to happen.

(c) Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight books of poems, most recently The Beauty (Knopf, 2015) long-listed for the National Book Award. She is also the author of two prose books, the now-classic Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015), winner of the Northern California Book Award. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and eight editions of The Best American Poems; among her honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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