Last night was my second Supper, a dinner party series I’m hosting for a mishmash of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. I’ve asked each guest to bring something to share: a poem, an idea, a song, an instrument, a dessert, a story, you get the idea. My friend Alex brought poetry. Specifically, the collection Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield. He read us the following poem, which I felt perfectly captured the essence of the fragmented perceptions we have of each other and of the vulnerability that is our only true means of knowing and being known:
The Silence One acquaintance says of another, “I think he’s a happy man,” then pauses. I see on his face what I also am thinking, and wonder what he is remembering, inside our silence. I am remembering a funeral, friend after friend rising to speak of the lost one. I did not know him well, yet still, by one thing he had told me, wore fully our closeness. Or perhaps it was even simpler— to whom else could he say the truth? I wondered, even then, how many others attending knew also one thing. Each secret separate, different, leading its life now without him: carrying laundry, washing the windows, straightening up. As they do, perhaps, I would like to sit down now and rest. I would like to ponder the flavor of how much I know of others, how much I do not; of what of me is known and what is not. A conversation is overhead on a train, on an airplane, and even Love cannot know the whole. It sits in the row behind, listening quietly to what it is able. Then the green and red wing-lights blink out; the train rounds the track’s curve and is lost. Love, also disappearing, would like to tap the two murmuring ones on the shoulder. Love would like to say to them, “Speak more fearlessly—This is the only—Say what you can.” Politeness forbids it. Love sits in the row behind, and quietly listens. Love lowers its stricken face so no one will see.
Until next week,
Elizabeth