Inventing Measure

blur
below me
stones...

Inventing Measure

Genius, perhaps, is making anything

worth the world’s stealing.

                                                Jane Hirshfield

Reading her Four-Postered

Beds of Mycenae, (and let me

read it through again and

again) she makes me

see not just the need of invention

but what was invented to measure

all the not- made- by- man things:

the moon say, that wasn’t always

but when it was and when it was

able didn’t stop being the moon simply

because a length and a spot

of time had been added, had been

stuck to comfort other objects

or animals that come into season

and pass out of season, not because

attention had been called, listen, didn’t

the doe, didn’t the opossum, the

armadillo, the artic fox already

know MOON and her tricky shifts?

Don’t they from their dens

of snow and ice and hollow tree,

drawn up in their tails or elegant

legs, having found a hollow

to wait the time out in, unmeasured

uncomprehending the hands, the sweep

of them across the face or

the way I’d seen the time flip

by on the little digital cards

on my grandmother’s bedside table.  Some-

times I’d watch, sometimes I’d turn

my back to them, but only so

I could listen in the easy quiet to each

little pad fall, a Rolodex of numbers on

a wheel, how they’d seem to sigh.  Contented.

But that too is an invention, isn’t it, a

satisfaction?  If we’ve given ourselves

enough credit, or too much, on

where we’ve been, where we are,

or where we’re going, the MOON remains,

always: at our feet, our knees,

our hips, our belly, our lung, our

clavicle, our lips and eyes, round

then as they are, and lidded, closing

opening, falling to come back around,

like clockwork, depending…