today, another universe

The arborist has determined:
senescence beetles canker
quickened by drought
but in any case
not prunable not treatable not to be propped.

And so.

The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.
The trunk where the ant.
The red squirrels’ eighty-foot playground.
The bark cambium pine-sap cluster of needles.

The Japanese patterns the ink-net.
The dapple on certain fish.

Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.

The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.

Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.

Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,

this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.

 ~ Jane Hirshfield

from Ledger

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

in my wallet I carry a card

In my wallet I carry a card

which declares I have the power to marry.

In my wallet I carry a card

which declares I may drive.

 
In my wallet I carry a card

that says to a merchant I may be trusted to pay her.

 
In my wallet I carry a card

that states I can borrow a book in the town where I live.

 
In my hand I carry a card

Its lines declare I am cardless, carless,

stateless, and have no money.

It is buoyant and edgeless.

It names me one of the Order of All Who Will Die.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Beauty

  

mosquito

I say I

and

a small mosquito drinks from my tongue

but many say we and hear I

say you or he and 

hear I

what can we do with this problem

a bowl held in both hands

cannot be filled by the holder

x, says the blue whale

x, say the krill

solve for y, says the ocean, then multiply by existence

the feet of an ant make their own sound on the earth

ice is astonished by water

a person misreads

delirium as delphinium

and falls into

a blueness sleepy as beauty when sneezing

the pronoun dozes

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Beauty

my species

even

a small purple artichoke

boiled

in its own bittered

and darkening

waters

grows tender,

grows tender and sweet

patience, I think,

my species

keep testing the spiny leaves

the spiny heart

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Beauty

the promise

Stay, I said

to the cut flowers.

They bowed

their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,

who fled.

Stay, leaf.

It reddened,

embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.

It sat as a dog does,

obedient for a moment,

soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth

of riverine valley meadows,

of fossiled escarpments,

of limestone and sandstone.

It looked back

with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.

Each answered,

Always.

~ Jane Hirshfield

perishable, it said

Perishable, it said on the plastic container,

and below, in different ink,

the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.

I found myself looking:

now at the back of each hand,

now inside the knees,

now turning over each foot to look at the sole.

Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,

then at the arguing jays.

Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.

Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,

hunger, sorrow, fears—

these too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.

How suddenly then

the strange happiness took me,

like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,

inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.

~ Jane Hirshfield

it was like this

It was like this:

you were happy, then you were sad,

then happy again, then not.

It went on.

You were innocent or you were guilty.

Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.

Mostly, it seems you were silent - what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness -

between you, there is nothing to forgive -

but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment

he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn't matter what they will make of you

or your days: they will be wrong,

they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,

all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,

you slept, you awakened.

Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

~ Jane Hirshfield

Sky: An Assay

A hawk flies though it, carrying

a still-twisting snake twice the length of its body.

Radiation, smoke, mosquitoes, the music of Mahler fly through it.

The sky makes room, adjusting its airy shoulders.

Sky doesn't age or remember,

carries neither grudges nor hope.

Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased

as the not quite imaginable first.

From the fate of thunderstorms, hailstorms, fog,

sky learns no lesson,

leaping through any window as soon as it's raised.

In speech, furious or tender,

it's still of passing sky the words are formed.

Whatever sky proposes is out in the open.

Clear even when not,

sky offers no model, no mirror - cloudy or bright -

to the ordinary heart: which is secretive,

rackety, domestic, harboring a wild uninterest in sky's disinterest.

And so we look right past sky, by it, through it,

to what also is moody and alters -

erosive mountains, eclipsable moons, stars distant but death-bound.

~ Jane Hirshfield

a hand is shaped for what it holds or makes

.

A hand is shaped for what it holds or makes.

Time takes what's handed to it then - warm bread, a stone,

a child whose fingers touch the page to keep her place.

Beloved, grown old separately, your face

shows me the changes on my own.

I see the histories it holds, the argument it makes

against the thresh of trees, the racing clouds, the race

of birds and sky birds always lose:

the lines have ranged, but not the cheek's strong bone.

My finger touching there recall that place.

Once we were one.  Then what time did, and hands, erased

us from the future we had owned.

For some, the future holds what hands release, not made.

We make a bridge.  We walked it.  Laced

night's sounds with passion.

Owls' pennywhistles, after, took our place.

Wasps leave their nest. Wind takes the papery case.

Our wooden house, less easily undone,

now houses others.  A life is shaped by what it holds or makes.

I make these words for what they can't replace.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

unnameable heart

The cricket who

kept me company three days

has fallen silent

I don't know where.

There are so many

lives of which I know nothing.

Even my own.  It moves now

through my fingers toward yours

and I know nothing

I can say that will name its heart.

A boat drifts far out

on the river below the mountains,

and below it

the fish, the great fish

that the one in the boat has come for,

swims in the shadow.

Perhaps the cricket is there, inside the fish.

Stranger things have happened.

I have looked everywhere else

for my lost companion.

From here the shadow looks small,

but to the fish it is huge.

Range after range of mountains,

and still the old painters

found a place

where two could walk together, side by side.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Lives of the Heart

the heart's counting knows only one

In Sung China, 

two monks friends for sixty years

watch the geese pass.

Where are they going?

one tested the other, who couldn't say.

That moment's silence continues.

No one will study their friendship

in the koan-books of insight.

No one will remember their names.

I think of them sometimes,

standing, perplexed by sadness,

goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes.

Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains,

but not yet.

As the barely audible

geese are not yet swallowed;

as even we, my love, will not entirely be lost.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Lives of the Heart

artist unknown from the Yuan Dynasty

unlabeled

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,

in me are 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

Jane was born on this day in New York City (1953). She went to Princeton, where she was in the first graduating class to include women in 1973. She published her first poem not long after, then went off to northern California to study Buddhism for the next eight years, during which time she didn't write at all. She said: " I don't think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn't just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live.

comments from Writers Almanac

The Heart's Counting Knows Only One

In Sung China,

two monks, friends for sixty years

watched the geese pass.

Where are they going?

one tested the other, who couldn't say.

That moment's silence continues.

No one will study their friendship

in the koan-books of insight.

No one will remember their names.

I think of them sometimes,

standing, perplexed by sadness,

goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes.

Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains,

but not yet.

As the barely audible

geese are not yet swallowed;

as even we, my love, will not entirely be lost.

~ Jane Hirshfield
from Lives of the Heart

art by Stanley Roseman

To Judgment: An Assay

.

You change a life

as eating an artichoke changes the taste 

of whatever is eaten after.

Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat -

not objectively present at all -

and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow:

to know if the distance between two things can be leapt.

The piano, that good servant,

has none of you in her at all, she lends herself

to what asks; this has been my ambition as well.

Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot

whose water comes from far-off mountain springs.

Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow,

coldly delicious.

For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn't mind,

not judgment.  Teeth pass,  Pain passes.

Judgment decrees what remains-

the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment

 of a boy-king entering Persia: "Burn it," he says,

and it burns.  And if a small tear swells the corner

of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him that a beetle

fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children.

The biologist Haldane - in one of his tenderer moments -

judged beetles especially loved by God,

"because He had made so many."  For judgment can be tender:

I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever

carries the quail. 


 Yet however much

I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you:

you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth.

When I have erased you from me entirely,

disrobed of your measuring adjectives,

stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns,

when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter -

then perhaps I will love you,  Helpless to not.

As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk,

find it sweet.

~  Jane Hirshfield,
from: 'After'

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 he 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

from The October Palace

photo by eliot porter

jasmine

.

"Almost the twenty-first century" -

how quickly the thought will grow dated,

even quaint.

Our hopes, our future,

will pass like the hopes and futures of others.

And all our anxieties and terrors,

nights of sleeplessness,

griefs,

will appear then as they truly are -

Stumbling, delirious bees in the tea scent of jasmine.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Lives of the Heart

pocket of fog

In the yard next door,

a pocket of fog like a small heard of bison

swallows azaleas, koi pond, the red-and-gold koi.

To be undivided must mean not knowing you are.

The fog grazes here, then there,

all morning browsing the shallows,

leaving no footprint between my fate and the mountain's.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

Articulation: An Assay

A good argument, etymology instructs,

is many-jointed.

By this measure,

the most expressive of beings must be the giraffe.

Yet the speaking tongue is supple,

untroubled by bone.

What would it be 

to take up no position,

to lie on this earth at rest, relieved of proof or change?

Scent of thyme or grass

amid the scent of many herbs and grasses.

Grief unresisted as granite darkened by rain.

Continuous praises most glad, placed against nothing.

But thought is hinge and swerve, is winch,

is folding.

"Reflection,"

we call the mountain in the lake,

whose existence resides in neither stone nor water.

~ Jane Hirshfield

three mornings

In Istanbul, my ears

three mornings heard the early call to prayer.

At fuller light, heard birds then,

water birds and tree birds, birds of migration.

Like three knowledges,

I heard them: incomprehension,

sweetened distance, longing.

When the body dies, where will they go,

those migrant birds and prayer calls,

as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer?

With voices of the ones I loved,

great loves and small loves, train wheels,

crickets, clock-ticks, thunder—where will they,

when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?

~ Jane Hirshfield

from harvard divinity school