Paul Auster’s recent publications include the autobiographical works Report from the Interior (2013) and Winter Journal (2012), and the novel Sunset Park (2010). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.

Blue. And within that blue a feeling
of green, the gray blocks of clouds
buttressed against air, as if
in the idea of rain
the eye
could master the speech
of any given moment

on earth. Call it the sky. And so
to describe
whatever it is
we see, as if it were nothing
but the idea
of something we had lost
within. For we can begin
to remember

the hard earth, the flint
reflecting stars, the undulating
oaks set loose
by the heaving of air, and so down
to the least seed, revealing what grows
above us, as if
because of this blue there could be
this green

that spreads, myriad
and miraculous
in this, the most silent
moment of summer. Seeds
speak of this juncture, define
where the air and the earth erupt
in this profusion of chance, the random

forces of our own lack
of knowing what it is
we see, and merely to speak of it
is to see
how words fail us, how nothing comes right
in the saying of it, not even these words
I am moved to speak
in the name of this blue
and green
that vanish into the air
of summer.

             Impossible
to hear it anymore. The tongue
is forever taking us away
from where we are, and nowhere
can we be at rest
in the things we are given
to see, for each word
is an elsewhere, a thing that moves
more quickly than the eye, even
as this sparrow moves, veering
into the air
in which it has no home. I believe, then,
in nothing

these words might give you, and still
I can feel them
speaking through me, as if
this alone
is what I desire, this blue
and tins green, and to say
how this blue
has become for me the essence
of this green, and more than the pure
seeing of it, I want you to feel

this word
that has lived inside me
all day long, this
desire for nothing

but the day itself, and how it has grown
inside my eyes, stronger
than the word it is made of, as if
there could never be another word

that would hold me
without breaking.

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poems, Reading to You (1995); a collection of essays, Living, Thinking, Looking (2012); and the novels The Blazing World (2014), The Summer Without Men (2011), The Sorrows of an American (2009), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (2004), What I Loved (2004), and The Blindfold (1992). Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.

9. They whisper,
Like those who see the dead in the same room:
Outlining the universe in a coffin.
It is strange to think that infinity has six sides.
Heaven is this cage of the cosmos,
Reduced to the minute and the placid,
Our reticulum visible in January,
Ten tiny lights on an oak lid,
Shining like glass where the world sleeps
In a cat's eye.