Tuesday, April 28, 2015

go deeper







Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,
love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.

Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.
And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.

Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths
out of sight, in the deep living heart.

But say, in the dark wild metal of your heart
is there a gem, which came into being between us?
is there a sapphire of mutual trust, a blue spark?
Is there a ruby of fused being, mine and yours, an inward glint?

If there is not, O then leave me, go away.
For I cannot be bullied back into the appearances of love,
any more than August can be bullied to look like March.

Love out of season, especially at the end of the season
is merely ridiculous.
If you insist on it, I insist on departure.

Have you no deep old heart of wild womanhood
self-forgetful, and gemmed with experience,
and swinging in a strange union of power
with the heart of the man you are supposed to have loved?

If you have not, go away.
If you can only sit with a mirror in your hand, an ageing woman
posing on and on as a lover,
in love with a self that now is shallow and withered,
your own self–that has passed like a last summer’s flower–

then go away–

I do not want a woman whom age cannot wither.
She is a made-up lie, a dyed immortelle
of infinite staleness.




~ D. H. Lawrence
from The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence



Thursday, April 16, 2015

february 29





An extra day -

Like the painting's fifth cow,
who looks out directly,
straight toward you,
from inside her black and white spots

An extra day -

Accidental, surely:
the made calendar stumbling over the real
as a drunk trips over a threshold
too low to see.

An extra day -
With a second cup of black coffee.
A friendly but businesslike phone call.
A mailed-back package.
Some extra work, but not too much -
just one day's worth, exactly.

An extra day -

Not unlike the space
between a door and its frame
when one room is lit and another is not,
and one changes into the other
as a woman exchanges a scarf.

An extra day -

Extraordinarily like any other.
And still
there is some generosity to it,
like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from The Beauty


Tuesday, April 7, 2015

a person protests to fate






A person protests to fate:

"The things you have caused
me most to want
are those that furthest elude me."

Fate nods.
Fate is sympathetic.

To tie the shoes, button a shirt,
are triumphs
for only the very young,
the very old.

During the middle:

conjugating a river
mastering tango
training the cat to stay off the table
preserving a single moment longer than this one
continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before

and the penmanships love practices inside the body.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from The Beauty


Sunday, April 5, 2015

like the small hole by the path-side something lives in






Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,
in me lives I do not know the names of,

nor the fates of,
nor the hungers of or what they eat.

They eat of me.
Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me
whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

And in my streets - the narrow ones,
unlabeled on the self-map -
they follow stairs down music ears can't follow,

and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,
in hours uncounted by the self-clock,
they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves.

There too have been the hard extinctions,
missing birds once feasted on and feasting.

There too must be machines
like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day,

A few escape, A mercy,

They leave behind
small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.





~ Jane Hirshfield 
from The Beauty
Fremont rock painting from San Raphael Swell
2000-1000 BC Caves Painting



Friday, April 3, 2015

in praise of being peripheral









Without philosophy,
tragedy,
history,

a gray squirrel
looks 
very busy.

Light as a soul
released
from a painting by Bosch,
its greens
and vermilions stripped off it.

He climbs a tree
that is equally ahistoric.

His heart works harder.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from The Beauty




Thursday, April 2, 2015

if someone asks







If someone asks
about the mind of this monk,
say it is no more than 
a passage of wind
in a vast sky.




~ Ryokan
from The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan
by Kazuaki Tanahashi