Driving Toward Oblivion

Here's a poem:

Biophilia

Most of us hungry at daybreak, sleepy by dark.
Some slept, one eye open, in water.
Some could trot.
Some of us lived till morning. Some did not.

Jane Hirshfield, Ledger
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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 the 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—

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
via Poem-a-Day

Jane Hirshfield and Moye

My friend Moye and I went out to dinner last night to celebrate her birthday and listen to the poet Jane Hirshfield at the Grand Central Library. We ate outdoors at a fancy restaurant that sits in the courtyard of the library. The night was beautiful and breezy. We ate French onion soup and kale salad and some kind of lamb dish with papardelle that I couldn't finish because I was full. We laughed, as always, and shared our lives. Moye is easily the kindest, most gentle woman I know who is also staggeringly talented and funny. Honestly, she might be perfect. Later, we sat next to each other in the small auditorium, our shoulders touching in the small seats, and I wondered at the beauty of the nearly forty years that have passed since we first met and the many times we sat together in English classes throughout middle and high school, listening to poems and teachers. We've gray-streaked hair and crows' feet now, yet we share a raucous sense of humor and love for what's beautiful.

I don't know Jane Hirshfield's poetry well, but I have read a few of her spare and beautiful poems over the years and recently savored an interview with her in Tricyle Magazine. In addition to being a poet, Hirshfield is also an ordained practitioner of Soto Zen Buddhism. Here's an excerpt from the Tricycle interview:

At any moment in a life, a person has this choice: presented with suffering, do we try to escape or to enter it further? Art’s gate is deciding to move toward entrance and not absence, and that choice has been a fundamental and shaping force in my life. We can’t sleepwalk through suffering: by its own definition, suffering is insufferable, unbearable, and so must be worked with. Since childhood, the way I’ve worked with it is by turning toward the gate of entrance: by writing poems.

Here's a poem:

As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail

When all else fails,
fail boldly,
fail with conviction,
as a hammer speaks to a nail,
or a lamp left on in daylight.

Say one.
If two does not follow,
say three, if that fails, say life,
say future.

Lacking future,
try bucket,
lacking iron, try shadow.

If shadow too fails,
if your voice falls and falls and keeps falling,
meets only air and silence,

say one again,
but say it with greater conviction,

as a nail speaks to a picture,
as a hammer left on in daylight.

Jane Hirshfield

Here's what she wrote in my copy of her new book, The Beauty:

How We Do It: Part LIII

So, it's Women's History Month, I think, or something like that. I'm not one for the holiday marker on a day. It's enough sometimes, just to get through them, much less mark them. This is also the last week that Sophie is in her teen years. She'll be twenty years old on Sunday. I used to have muscle memory of each year that passed. I remember the sixth was a particularly difficult one. The Husband a few years before had said confidently, I think she'll be talking at six. Even before that, though, some magazine like Time had a picture of a window on the cover of an issue about brains, and somewhere inside some scientist stated that the window slammed shut at three years old. Those years are blurry to me, now, except when they're not. The muscles have atrophied. I might be making up the cover of the magazine, but I'm not making up the window. I heard it slamming for years before They (it's always They, isn't it?) discovered it actually stays open well into Old Agedom. I think the tenth year was another one where the muscles ached. Sophie was sick then, so sick. I didn't think she'd live. There might have been some muscle aching at twelve and maybe some temporary paralysis at fifteen, and every year in between and afterward seemed a cause for celebration. There was incredulity for each one, though, and not a small amount of gratitude. My muscles don't seem to have memory now like they used to. I've always hated to exercise. So, Sophie will be twenty years old on Sunday. The window is open, and it looks beautiful outside.

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

what I read in the bath today at noon, alone in the house for hours, the first bath I've had in the house for over thirteen years:



My Life Was The Size Of My Life

My life was the size of my life.
Its rooms were room-sized.
its soul was the size of a soul.
In its background, mitochondria hummed,
above it sun, clouds, snow,
the transit of stars and planets.
It rode elevators, bullet trains,
various airplanes, a donkey.
It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose.
It ate, it slept, it opened
and closed its hands, its windows.
Others, I know, had lives larger.
Others, I know, had lives shorter.
The depth of lives, too, is different.
There were times my life and I made jokes together.
There were times we made bread.
Once, I grew moody and distant.
I told my life I would like some time,
I would like to try seeing others.
In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned.
I was hungry, then, and my life,
my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep
our hands off our clothes on our tongues from

Jane Hirshfield