French Horn 


    For a few days only,
    the plum tree outside the window
    shoulders perfection.
    No matter the plums will be small,
    eaten only by squirrels and jays.
    I feast on the one thing, they on another,
    the shoaling bees on a third.
    What in this unpleated world isn?t someone?s seduction?
    The boy playing his intricate horn in Mahler?s Fifth,
    in the gaps between playing,
    turns it and turns it, dismantles a section,
    shakes from it the condensation
    of human passage. He is perhaps twenty.
    Later he takes his four bows, his face deepening red,
    while a girl holds a viola?s spruce wood and maple
    in one half-opened hand and looks at him hard.
    Let others clap.
    These two, their ears still ringing, hear nothing.
    Not the shouts of bravo, bravo,
    not the timpanic clamor inside their bodies.
    As the plum?s blossoms do not hear the bee
    nor taste themselves turned into storable honey
    by that sumptuous disturbance.

                         Jane Hirshfield