The Horizontal Line
Edward Hirsch
Homage to Agnes Martin
It was like a white sail in
the early morning
-
It was like a tremulous wind calming itself
After a
night on the thunderous sea
-
The exhausted lightning lay down on its side
And slept on a bed of cumulous sheets
-
She came out of the mountains
And surrendered to the expansiveness of a plain
-
She underlined a text in
Isaiah:
Make level in the desert
A
highway for our God
Every valley shall be exalted
And every mountain and
hill shall be made low
-
The mountain grew tired of striving
upward
And longed to flatten its ragged peaks
-
The nostalgia of a
cathedral for the open plain
-
The nostalgia of a soprano for plainsong
-
I know a woman who slept on a cot
And sailed over the abyss on a wooden
plank
-
She looked as far as the eye
can see
But the eye is a circle - poor pupil -
And the universe curved
-
It was like a pause on the Bridge of Sighs
An instant before the storm
Or the moment afterward
-
My friend listened to Gregorian chants
On the
car radio as he raced down
A two-lane highway in southern France
-
I
remember riding a bicycle very fast
On a country road where the yellow line
Quivered ever so slightly in the sun
-
The faint tremor in my father's
hand
When he signed his name after the stroke
-
The beauty of an
imperfection
-
An almost empty canvas turned on its side
A zip that
forever changed its mind
-
From its first pointed stroke
To its last
brush with meaning
The glow of the was spiritual
-
How the
childlike pencil went for a walk
And came home skipping
-
It was like
lying down at dusk to rest
On the cool pavement under the car
After a
blistering day in the desert
-
The beaded evanescence of the summer heat
-
The horizon was a glimmering blue band
A luminous streamer in the
distance
-
I recited, Brightness falls from the air
And the
suyddenly whisked me away
-
No chapel is more breathtaking
Than
the one that has been retrieved
On the horizon of memory
-
She
remembered the stillness of a pool
Before the swimmers entered the water
And the colorful ropes dividing the lanes
-
Each swimmer was a scar in the
blue mist
-
Invisible bird,
Whistle me up from the dark on a bright
branch
-
It's not the low murmur of your voice
Almost beraking over the
phone
But the thin wire of grief
The hum of joy that connects us
-
Sacred dream of
geometry,
Ruler and protractor, temper my anguish,
Untrouble my mind
-
Heartbeat, steady my hand
-
Each year she crossed a line
Through the
front page of a fresh diary
And vowed to live above the line
-
She
would not up with others
She would align herself with the simple truth
-
She erased every in her notebook but one
Farewell to the
aspirations of the vertical
The ecstasies of the diagonal
The suffering
cross
-
Someone left a prayer book open in the rain
And the printed
lines blurred
Ink smudged our fingers when we prayed
-
Let every
be its own revelation
-
The in the painting was surrounded by light
The light in the painting held its breath
On the threshold of a discovery
-
If only she could picture
The boundlessness of God drawing
An
invisible thread through the starry spaces
-
If only she could paint
The horizon without limits
-
A horizontal is a pilgrimage
-
A
segment of devotion wrested from time
-
An infinitely gentle mark on a
blank page
-
The stripe remains after everything else is gone
-
It
is a wisp of praise with a human hand
-
It is singing on a bare canvas
Edward Hirsch has published six books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (Knopf, 1981, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award), The Night Parade (Knopf, 1989), Earthly Measures (Knopf, 1994), On Love (Knopf, 1998), and Lay Back the Darkness (Knopf, 2003). He has also written three prose books: How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (Harcourt Brace, 1999), Responsive Reading (University of Michigan Press, 1999) and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (Harcourt, 2002). A frequent contributor to leading magazines and periodicals, including The New Yorker, Double Take and American Poetry Review, he also writes a weekly column on poetry for the Washington Post Book World. He has receives the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is the fourth president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.