Jane Hirshfield

F L S T [

Fado

A man reaches close
and lifts a quarter
from inside a girl’ s ear,
from her hands takes a dove
she didn’ t know was there.
Which amazes more,
you may wonder:
the quarter’ s serrated murmur
against the thumb
or the dove’ s knuckled silence?
That he found them,
or that she never had,
or that in Portugal,
this same half-stopped moment,
it’ s almost dawn,
and a woman in a wheelchair
is singing a fado
that puts every life in the room
on one pan of a scale,
itself on the other,