Seawater Stiffens Cloth by Jane Hirshfield

Seawater Stiffens Cloth

 

Seawater stiffens cloth long after it’s dried.

As pain after it’s ended stays in the body:

A woman moves her hands oddly

because her grandfather passed through

a place he never spoke of. Making

instead the old jokes with angled fingers.

Call one thing another’s name long enough,

it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.

Call it a tree whose shape of   branches happened.

Call what branching happened a man

whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.

Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples,

to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking.

Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence.