the weighing

The heart's reasons

seen clearly,

even the hardest

will carry

its whip-marks and sadness

and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved

eland forgives

the drought-starved lion

who finally takes her,

enters willingly then

the life she cannot refuse,

and is lion, is fed,

and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.

~ Jane Hirshfield

to spareness

.

You lean toward nonexistence,

but have not yet become it entirely.

For this reason, you can still be praised.

The tree unleafing enters your dominion.

An early snowfall shows you abide in all things.

Your two dimensions are line and inclination.

Therefore desire,

though is incinders each mote of its object, itself is spare.

The late paintings of Turner

prove your slender depths without limit.

The beauty too of shakuhachi and cello.

"Winter darkness. Rain. No crickets singing."

-You are there, pulling hard on the rope-end.

Remembering you, I remember also compassion.

I cannot explain this.

Nor how you live in a teabowl

or in a stone that has spent a long time in a river.

Nor the way you at times can signal your own contradiction,

meaning extra, but not by much-

"Brother, can you spare a dime," one thin man asks another.

Any room, however cluttered, gestures toward you,

declaring:

"Here lives this, not that."

In mathematics, the modest "<" sign gestures toward you.

Your season is surely November,

your fruit, persimmons ripening by coldness.

Your sound a crow cry, a bus idling at night by roadside.

Without apparent effect,

and so you remind of starlight on the colors of a cow's hide.

Your proposition, like you, is simple, of interest only to the human soul:

vast reach of all that is not, and still something is.

~ Jane Hirshfield

what you are given

.

You work with what you are given,

the red clay of grief,

the black clay of stubbornness going on after. 

Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,

clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, 

each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table. 

There are honeys so bitter

no one would willingly choose to take them.

The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity, 

honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus—slip and stubbornness,

bottom of river, my own consumed life—

when will I learn to read it

plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire? 

Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, 

we become our choices.

Each yes, each one continues,

this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness. 

The anvil leans into its silence. 

The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Given Sugar, Given Salt
art by Vic Muniz

for the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen

Back then, what did I know?

The names of subway lines, buses.

How long it took to walk twenty blocks.

Uptown and downtown.

Not north, not south, not you.

When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air,

you were gray-green, incomprehensible, old.

What you clung to, hung from: old.

Trees looking half-dead, stones.

Marriage of fungi and algae,

chemists of air,

changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.

Like those nameless ones

who kept painting, shaping, engraving

unseen, unread, unremembered.

Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.

Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust,

ash-of-the-woods.

Transformers unvalued, uncounted.

Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

late prayer

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.

It goes out to everything equally,

circling rabbit and hawk.

Look: in the iron bucket,

a single nail, a single ruby -

all the heavens and hells.

They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

~  Jane Hirshfield 

from The Lives of the Heart

optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous

tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,

mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.

 

 

~ Jane Hirshfield 

 

 

 

until

Until each breath refuses they, those, them.
Until the Dramatis Personae of the book’s first page says, “Each one is you.”
Until hope bows to its hopelessness only as one self bows to another.

 Until cruelty bends to its work and sees suddenly: I.

Until anger and insult know themselves burnable legs of a useless table.
Until the unsurprised unbidden knees find themselves bending.

 Until fear bows to its object as a bird’s shadow bows to its bird.

 Until the ache of the solitude inside the hands, the ribs, the ankles.

 Until the sound the mouse makes inside the mouth of the cat.

 Until the inaudible acids bathing the coral.

Until what feels no one’s weighing is no longer weightless.
Until what feels no one’s earning is no longer taken.
Until grief, pity, confusion, laughter, longing know themselves mirrors.
Until by we we mean I, them, you, the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger.
Until by I we mean as a dog barks, sounding and vanishing and
sounding and vanishing completely.

Until by until we mean I, we, you, them, the muskrat, the tiger, the
hunger, the lonely barking of the dog before it is answered.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Ledger

 

the envoy

One day in that room, a small rat.

Two days later, a snake.

.

Who, seeing me enter,

whipped the long stripe of his

body under the bed,

then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don't know how either came or left.

Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched

as something -- terror? happiness? grief? --

entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in.

Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.

It slept where light could not go.

Its scent was neither snake nor rat,

neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives

of which we know nothing.

Through them

the belled herds travel at will,

long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

~  Jane Hirshfield

from Given Sugar, Given Salt

how rarely I have stopped to thank the steady effort

A person speaking

pauses, lets in

a little silence-portion with the words.

It is like an hour.

Any hour. This one.

Something happens, much does not.

Or as always, everything happens:

the standing walls keep

standing with their whole attention.

A noisy crow call lowers and lifts its branch,

the crow scent enters the leaves, enters the bark,

like stirred-in honey gone into the tea.

How rarely I have stopped to thank

the steady effort of the world to stay the world.

To thank the furnish of green

and abandon of yellow. The ancient Sumerians

called the beloved “Honey,” as we do.

Said also, “Borrowed bread is not returned.”

Like them, we pay love’s tax to bees,

we go on arranging the old notes in different orders.

Desire inside A C A G G A T.

Forgiveness in G T A C T T.

In a world of space and time, arrangement matters.

An hour has no front or back,

except to those whose eyes face forward,

whose tears blur thought and stars.

Five genes, in a certain arrangement,

will spend this life unrooted, grazing.

It has to do with how the animal body comes into being,

the same whether ant or camel.

What then does such unfolded code understand,

if it finds in its mouth the word important —

the thing that can be carried, or the thing that cannot,

or the way they keep trading places,

grief and gladness, the comic, the glum, the dead, the living.

Last night, the big Sumerian moon

clambered into the house empty-handed

and left empty-handed,

not thief, not lover, not tortoise, just looking around,

shuffling its soft, blind slippers over the floor.

This felt, to me, important, and so I looked back with both hands

open, palms unblinking.

What caused the fire, we ask, meaning, lightning, wiring, matches.

How precisely and unbidden

oxygen slips itself into, between those thick words.

~  Jane Hirshfield

from the New York Times

print on April 15, 2012, on page SR6 of the 

New York edition with the headline: Tax Break. 

tree

.

 

It is foolish

to let a young redwood 

grow next to a house.

 

Even in this 

one lifetime,

you will have to choose.

 

That great calm being,

this clutter of soup pots and books—

 

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. 

Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life...

 

 

 

 

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Given Sugar, Given Salt

.

poetry and the mind of concentration

.

Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections—language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who are, what we are. It begins, that is, in the mind and body of concentration. 

By concentration, I mean a particular state of awareness: penetrating, unified, and focused, yet also permeable and open. This quality of consciousness, though not easily put into words, is instantly recognizable. Aldous Huxley described it as the moment the doors or perception open; James Joyce called in epiphany. The experience of concentration may be quietly physical—a simple, unexpected sense of deep accord between yourself and everything. It may come as the harvest of long looking and leave us, as it did Wordsworth, a mind thought "too deep for tears." Within action, it is felt as a grace state: time slows and extends, and a person's every movement and decision seem to partake of perfection. Concentration can also be place into things—it radiates undimmed from Vermeer's paintings, form the small marble figure of a lyre-player from ancient Greece, from a Chinese three-footed bowl—and into musical notes, words, ideas. In the whole-heartedness of concentration, world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done. 

A request for concentration isn't always answered, but people engaged in many disciplines have found ways to invite it in. A ninth-century Zen monk, Zuigan, could be heard talking to himself rather sternly each morning: "Master Zuigan!" he would call out. "Yes?" “Are you here?" “Yes!" Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady presence, free from the distractions of interest and boredom. 

Writers, too, must find a path into concentration. Some keep a fixed time of day for writing, or engage in small rituals of preparation and invitation. One may lay out exactly six freshly sharpened pencils, another may darken the room, a third may develop as add a routine as Flaubert, who began each workday by sniffing a drawer of aging apples. Immersion in art itself can be the place of entry, as Adam Zagajewski points out in "A River": "Poems from poems, songs / from songs, paintings from paintings." Yet however it is brought into being, true concentration appears—paradoxically—at the moment willed effort drops away. It is then that a person enters what scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described as "flow" and Zen calls "effortless effort." At such moments, there may be some strong emotion present—a feeling of joy, or even grief—but as often, in deep concentration, the self disappears. We seem to fall utterly into the object of our attention, or else vanish into attentiveness itself. 

This may explain why the creative is so often described as impersonal and beyond self, as if inspiration were literally what its etymology implies, something "breathed in." We refer, however metaphorically, to the Muse, and speak of profound artistic discovery as revelation. And however much we may come to believe that "the real" is subjective and constructed, we still feel art is a path not just to beauty, but to truth: if "truth" is a chosen narrative, then new stories, new aesthetics, are also new truths.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Nine Gates, Entering the Mind of Poetry

A person wakes from sleep

.

A person wakes from sleep
and does not know for a time
who she is, who he is.
This happens in a lifetime
once or twice.
It has happened to you, no doubt.
Some in that moment
panic,
some sigh with pleasure.
How each kind later envies the other,
who must so love their lives.

~   Jane Hirshfield

my doubt

I wake, doubt, beside you,

like a curtain half-open.

I dress doubting,

like a cup 

undecided if it has been dropped.

I eat doubting,

work doubting,

go out to a dubious cafe with skeptical friends.

I go to sleep doubting myself,

as a herd of goats

sleep in a suddenly gone-quiet truck.

I dream you, doubt,

nightly—

for what is the meaning of dreaming

if not that all we are while inside it

is transient, amorphous, in question?

Left hand and right hand,

doubt, you are in me,

throwing a basketball, guiding my knife and my fork.

Left knee and right knee,

we run for a bus,

for a meeting that surely will end before we arrive.

I would like

to grow content in you, doubt,

as a double-hung window

settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes.

I doubt I can do so:

your own counterweight governs my nights and my days.

As the knob of hung lead holds steady

the open mouth of a window,

you hold me,

my kneeling before you resistant, stubborn,

offering these furious praises

I can't help but doubt you will ever be able to hear.

~ Jane Hirshfield

art by van gogh

everything has two endings

Everything has two endings -

a horse, a piece of string, a phone call

Before a life, air

And after

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

amor fati

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

Little soul,

you have wandered

lost a long time.

The woods all dark now,

birded and eyed.

Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open.

The fairy tales warn you:

Do not go in,

you who would eat will be eaten.

You go in. You quicken.

You want to have feet.

You want to have eyes.

You want to have fears.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Poetry (February 2017)

with thanks to Love is a Place

calm and complete

On the days when the rest

have failed you,

let this much be yours -

flies, dust, and unnameable odor,

the two waiting baskets:

one for the lemons and passion,

the other for all you have lost.

Both empty,

it will come to your shoulder,

breathe slowly against your bare arm.

If you offer it hay, it will eat.

Offered nothing,

it will stand as long as you ask.

The little bells of the bridle will hang

beside you quietly,

in the heat and the tree's thin shade.

Do not let its sparse mane deceive you,

or the way the left ear swivels into dream.

This too is a gift of the gods,

calm and complete.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Lives of the Heart

art by McKenzie Birnie

one loss

One loss

folds itself inside another.

It is like the origami

held inside a plain sheet of paper

Not creased yet.

Not yet more heavy.

The hand stays steady.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come Thief

the tongue says loneliness

The tongue says loneliness, anger, grief,

but does not feel them.

As Monday cannot feel Tuesday,

nor Thursday

reach back to Wednesday

as a mother reaches out for her found child.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

Not a bell, 

but the sound of the bell in the bell-shape,

lashing full strength with the first blow from inside the iron.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

burlap sack

A person is full of sorrow

the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.

We say, "Hand me the sack,"

but we get the weight.

Heavier if left out in the rain.

To think that the sand or stones are the self is an error.

To think that grief is the self is an error.

Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,

being careful between the trees to leave extra room.

The mule is not the load of ropes and nails and axes.

The self is not the miner nor builder nor driver.

What would it be to take the bride

and leave behind the heavy dowry?

To let the thin-ribbed mule browse in tall grasses,

its long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?

~ Jane Hirshfield

in space

In space

(the experiment

suggested by two fifth graders),

a Canadian astronaut

wrings water out of a towel.

It stays by the towel,

horizontal

transparent isinglass,

a hyaline column.

Then begins to cover his hands,

his wrists,

stays on them

until he passes it to another towel.

On earth

some who watch this

recognize the wrung, irrational soul.

How it does not leave

but stays close,

outside the cleaning twist-fate but close--

fear  desire  anger

joy  irritation 

mourning

wet stuff

that is shining, that cannot go from us,

having nowhere other to fall.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Beauty