The Evanescence
(after Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, #858)

Edward Hirsch

1

The day was green and abstract
Like looking at a field from a shaking train

With yellow light smudged
And smeared in the distance.

The dark trees blurred in the wind
And the earth was always rushing past.

2

How the windswept beach at dawn
Resembled Abraham’s dream:

He carried a small body
Trembling in his arms,

A sweet kid dipped in blood
For a terrible meat-eating God.

3

The morning was still bruised
By the lingering memory of darkness,

But the gulls—the bloodthirsty gulls—
Called us back to the shore.

Walk with me a while
In the black-and-blue wake of night.
4

The clouds dissolved in the sky
Over the scumbling waves.

A beach littered with debris,
A sky scribbled with erasures,

And a watery sun floating away.
How does anyone ever sleep?

5

I glimpsed a yellow-beaked redbird—
Radiant, luminescent—

Tilting on one wing
And skimming the shoreline

Just as it was getting dark.
Look. I swear I saw it.

6

I dreamt of a German forest
Dissolving into a red sea.

There were insect creatures
Chasing us, there were metallic birds. . .

The sea parted for us, love,
But then it was soaked in blood.

7

I stood at the Memorial Wall at dusk
And pictured the barbed-wire fences.

The air was thick with testimonies
Written in red ink.
I had not witnessed the violence,
But violence remembered me.

8

The world was rushing by so fast
That we felt dizzy studying it.

The day was gray and abstract
Like looking at the sky from a shaking train.

We had brushed against the light,
We had been brushed by evanescence.