A hawk flies though it, carrying
a still-twisting snake twice the length of its body.
Radiation, smoke, mosquitoes, the music of Mahler fly through it.
The sky makes room, adjusting its airy shoulders.
Sky doesn't age or remember,
carries neither grudges nor hope.
Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased
as the not quite imaginable first.
From the fate of thunderstorms, hailstorms, fog,
sky learns no lesson,
leaping through any window as soon as it's raised.
In speech, furious or tender,
it's still of passing sky the words are formed.
Whatever sky proposes is out in the open.
Clear even when not,
sky offers no model, no mirror - cloudy or bright -
to the ordinary heart: which is secretive,
rackety, domestic, harboring a wild uninterest in sky's disinterest.
And so we look right past sky, by it, through it,
to what also is moody and alters -
erosive mountains, eclipsable moons, stars distant but death-bound.
--Jane Hirshfield
*not Mahler -- Chopin, Etude in A-Flat Major, No. 1 from Trois Nouvelles Etudes, Vladimir Horowitz
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