Jane Hirshfield

Door and Sentence


My life,
you were a door I was given
to walk through.

Dawdling
in lintel and loosestrife as much as permitted.

Your own glass knob,
I spoke you:

A sentence, however often rewritten,
ending always with the same slightly rusty-hinged preposition,
sometimes, for mercy, hidden.


*


Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me


The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.

Today, I woke without answer.

The day answers, unpockets a thought as though from a friend—

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet       didn’t it give you the asking


*


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.


*


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 stones or sand 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?
 

NEW POEMS (2023)
Door and Sentence    3
Counting, New Year’s Morning,
What Powers Yet Remain to Me    4
Tin    5
Manifest    6
Solstice    8
Two Versions    9
Today, When I Could Do Nothing    10
Poem Holding a Wristwatch Belonging to
the Brazilian Poet Ferreira Gullar    12
Each Morning Calls Us to Praise
This World That Is Fleeting    13
Two Kerosene Lanterns    14
To Be a Person    15
O, Responsibility    16
[Five Pebbles]    17
Here & Now    17
Words Stop    17
My Failure    17
Chrysanthemum    17
Vestment    17
A Day Just Ends    18
I asked to be lush, to be green.    19
“A map grows no trees.”    20
Thermopolium    21
The Difficult Day    22
Poem to Be Written by Magnet in Oil for an Exhibit
at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro    23
Body, Mind of the Ransacked Thrift Shop    24
Silence: An Assay    25
My Window    26
Invitation    27
Again, I Enter My Life    28
Mosses    30
Letter to Adam Zagajewski    32
Aubade Now of Earth    33
I Would Like    34
I open the window.    36

from ALAYA (1971–1982)
And / Yes in the Fields You    39
December Solstice, ’73    40
Everything That Is Not You    41

from OF GRAVITY & ANGELS (1988)
After Work    45
In a Net of Blue and Gold    46
Invocation    47
To Hear the Falling World    48
Dialogue    49
To Drink    50
Heat    51
Tonight the Incalculable Stars    53
For What Binds Us    54
November, Remembering Voltaire    55
Evening, Late Fall    56
Osiris    57
Woman in Red Coat    58
Justice Without Passion    59
October 20, 1983    60
On Reading Brecht    61
With Singing and Banners    62
A Story    63
Childhood, Horses, Rain    64
Autumn Quince    65

from THE OCTOBER PALACE (1994)
The Kingdom    69
Each Step    70
1973    71
The Groundfall Pear    73
Percolation    74
Happiness    75
The Love of Aged Horses    76
Inspiration    77
History as the Painter Bonnard    78
Narcissus: Tel Aviv, Baghdad, California, February 1991    79
The Wedding    80
A Plenitude    82
The Door    83
Floor    84
“Perceptibility Is a Kind of Attentiveness”    85
This Love    87
Even the Vanishing Housed    88
A Sweetening All Around Me as It Falls    89
Leaving the October Palace    90
Autumn    91
Ripeness    92
The Weighing    93
The Gods Are Not Large    94
The Heart as Origami    95
Meeting the Light Completely    96
Within This Tree    97
The Task    98
Empedocles’ Physics    99
The Stone of Heaven    100

from THE LIVES OF THE HEART (1988)
Secretive Heart    105
Mule Heart    106
Salt Heart    107
On the Beach    108
Heart Starting and Stopping in the Late Dark    109
The World Loved by Moonlight    110
The Adamantine Perfection of Desire    111
Standing Deer    112
Changing Everything    113
Da Capo    114
Not-Yet    115
Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight    116
Leaf    117
Hope and Love    118
Late Prayer    119
Each Happiness Ringed by Lions    120
Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World    121
Orange Oil in Darkness    122
The Sweetness of Apples, of Figs    123
Wine Grapes for Breakfast    124
Bees    125
Lake and Maple    126
Milk    128
Jasmine    130
The Poet    131
Blind Fate Walking on Ice in the Woods    132
The Bearded Woman    133
Spell for Inviting-in the New Soul    134
Spell to Be Said Before Sleep    135
Spell to Be Said Upon Departure    136
Three Times My Life Has Opened    137

from GIVEN SUGAR, GIVEN SALT (2001)
The Envoy    141
Red Berries    142
Apple    143
A Hand    144
Habit    145
Rebus    146
Waking This Morning Dreamless After Long Sleep    147
Bobcats, Beetles, Owls    148
Great Powers Once Raged Through Your Body    149
The Contract    150
Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk—    151
This Was Once a Love Poem    152
Button    153
Inflection Finally Ungraspable by Grammar    154
In Praise of Coldness    155
Happiness Is Harder    156
Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand    157
Pillow    158
Poem with Two Endings    160
“Nothing Lasts”    161
Self-Portrait in a Borrowed Cabin    162
All Evening, Each Time I Started to Say It    163
Ladder    164
Balance    165
A Cedary Fragrance    166
Identity    167
For Horses, Horseflies    168
Moment    169
Speed and Perfection    170
Optimism    171
Tree    172
The Silence    173
Sleep    175
Ink    178
Metempsychosis    181

from AFTER (2006)
After Long Silence    185
Theology    186
Pyracantha and Plum    187
Dog and Bear    188
The Woodpecker Keeps Returning    189
Vilnius    190
To Judgment: An Assay    191
To Opinion: An Assay    193
Ryoanji: An Assay    194
“Of”: An Assay    194
To Speech: An Assay    195
Possibility: An Assay    198
Against Certainty    199
Those Who Cannot Act    200
The Double    201
I Imagine Myself in Time    202
Late Self-Portrait by Rembrandt    203
The Heat of Autumn    204
Burlap Sack    205
The Monk Stood Beside a Wheelbarrow    206

[Ten Pebbles]   207
Global Warming    207
The Complaint    207
Maple    207
Lemon    207
Tool Use in Animals    207
To Sneezing    208
Why Bodhidharma Went to Motel 6    208
A Class Almost Empty    208
Sentence    208
Red Scarf    209

In a Room with Five People, Six Griefs    210
“It is Night. It is Very Dark.”    211
The Promise    212
The Bell Zygmunt    213
The Dead Do Not Want Us Dead    214
It Was Like This: You Were Happy    215

from COME, THIEF (2011)
French Horn    219
First Light Edging Cirrus    220
The Decision    221
Vinegar and Oil    222
Narrowness    223
Sheep    224
Perishable, It Said    225
Love in August    226
Bruises    227
The Promise    228
China    229
If Truth Is the Lure, Humans Are Fishes    230
Seawater Stiffens Cloth    231
Washing Doorknobs    232
Heat and Desperation    233
Alzheimer’s    234
Green-Striped Melons    235
All the Difficult Hours and Minutes    236
The Present    237

[Thirteen Pebbles]    238
Like Moonlight Seen in a Well    238
Mountain and Mouse    238
Memorial    238
Everything Has Two Endings    238
The Cloudy Vase    238
The Lost Love Poems of Sappho    239
It Must Be Leaves    239
The Perfection of Loss    239
The Visible Heat    240
Rainstorm Visibly Shining in the Left-out Spoon of a Leaf    240
Sonoma Fire    240
Night and Day    240
Opening the Hands Between Here and Here    241

A Blessing for Wedding    242
Come, Thief    242
For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches’ Hair, Map Lichen, Beard
Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen    243
A Small-Sized Mystery    244
Contentment    245
The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident.
I Thought of My Life.    246
The Kind Man    247
A Day Is Vast    248
Stone and Knife    249
Pompeii    250
Suitcase    251
My Luck    252
A Hand Is Shaped for What It Holds or Makes    253
I Ran Out Naked in the Sun    254
The Supple Deer    255

from THE BEAUTY (2015)
Fado    259
My Skeleton    260
My Proteins    262
My Species    264
My Eyes    265
My Weather    266
My Life Was the Size of My Life    267
Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight    268
Things Keep Sorting Themselves    269
A Cottony Fate    270
I Wanted Only a Little    271
February 29    272
As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail    273

[Nine Pebbles]    274
I Sat in the Sun    274
The Woman, the Tiger    274
I Know You Think I’ve Forgotten    274
Still Life    274
Quartz Clock    274
Humbling: An Assay    275
Away from Home, I Thought of the Exiled Poets    275
Two Linen Handkerchiefs    275
Anywhere You Look    275

This Morning, I Wanted Four Legs    276
Works & Loves    277
A Chair in Snow    279
Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side
Something Lives In    280
In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed    281
All Souls    282
Zero Plus Anything Is a World    283
Entanglement    284
Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied by Rain    286


from LEDGER (2020)
Let Them Not Say    289
The Bowl    290
As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor
Above Us    291
Ants’ Nest    292
Today, Another Universe    293
Cataclysm    294
Fecit    295
Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space
Station and a Full Moon over the Gulf of Mexico
and All Its Invisible Fishes    296
Practice    297
Words    298
She Breathes in the Scent    299
Engraving: World-Tree with an Empty Beehive
on One Branch    300
Now a Darkness Is Coming    301
My Doubt    302
I wanted to be surprised.    304
Vest    306
Brocade    308
Chance darkened me.    309
Branch    310
In Ulvik    311
Advice to Myself    312
A Ream of Paper    313
The Paw-Paw    314
Like Others    315

[Ten Pebbles]    316
My Longing    316
My Hunger    316
My Contentment    316
Wild Turkeys    316
Library Book with Many Precisely Turned-down Corners    317
O Snail    317
A Strategy    317
Sixth Extinction    317
Biophilia    317
Obstacle    317

The Little Soul Poems    318
Amor Fati    318
Kitchen    318
Snow    319
Harness    319
Pelt    319
Rust Flakes on Wind    320
Wood. Salt. Tin.    320
I Said    321

Ledger    322
On the Fifth Day    323
(No Wind, No Rain)    324
Ghazal for the End of Time    325
Mountainal    326
My Debt    327

Acknowledgments    331
Index of titles    333
Biographical note    341