Jane Hirshfield

Spell To Be Said Upon Departure

What was come here to do

having finished,

shelves of the water lie flat.

Copper the leaves of the doorsill,

yellow and falling.

Scarlet the bird that is singing.

Vanished the labor, here walls are.

Completed the asking.

Loosing the birds there is water.

Having eaten the pears.

Having eaten

the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples.

Table be strewn.

Table be strewn with stems,

table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure.

Table be strewn with pleasure,

what was here to be done having finished.

Jane Hirshfield

(MacDowell 1994; in The Lives of the Heart, HarperCollins, 1997)

Used by permission of Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved

Three Times My Life Has Opened

Three times my life has opened.

Once, into darkness and rain.

Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and starts

to remember each time it enters the act of love.

Once, to the fire that holds all.

These three were not different.

You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.

But outside my window all day a maple has stepped from her leaves

like a woman in love with winter, dropping the colored silks.

Neither are we different in what we know.

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light

stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,

or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

Jane Hirshfield

(MacDowell 1994; in The Lives of the Heart, HarperCollins, 1997)

Used by permission of Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved

Of Yield and Abandon

A muscular, thick-pelted woodchuck,

created in yield, in abandon, lifts onto his haunches.

Behind him, abundance of ferns, a rock wall’s

coldness, never in sun, a few noisy grackles.

Our eyes find shining beautiful

because it reminds us of water. To say this

does not make fewer the rooms of the house

or lessen its zinc-ceilinged hallways.

There is something that waits inside us,

a nearness that fissures, that fishes. Leaf shine

and stone shine edging the tail of the woodchuck silver,

splashing the legs of chickens and clouds.

In Russian, the translator told me,

there is no word for “thirsty”—a sentence,

as always, impossible to translate.

But what is the point of preserving the bell

if to do so it must be filled with concrete or wax?

A body prepared for travel but not for singing.

Jane Hirshfield

(MacDowell 2008; in Come, Thief, Knopf 2011)

Used by permission of Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved

Contentment

I had lived on this earth

more than fifty years

before hearing the sound

of sixteen New Hampshire Reds

settling in before sleep.

Dusk gathered

like a handkerchief

into a pouch

of clean straw.

But only fifteen

adjusted themselves

on the wooden couch.

One, with more white in her feathers

than the feathers of others,

still wandered outside,

away from the chuckling,

some quiet joke

neither she nor I quite heard.

“The foxes will have you,” I told her.

She scratched the ground,

found a late insect to feast on.,

set her clipped beak to peck at my shoe.

Reached for, she ran.

Ran from the ramp

I herded her toward as well.

I tried raccoons, then cold.

I tried stew.

She found a fresh seed.

Her legs were white and clean

and appeared very strong.

We ran around the coop

that way a long time,

she seeming delighted, I flapping.

Darkness, not I, brought her in.

Jane Hirshfield

(MacDowell 2008; in Come, Thief, Knopf 2011)

Used by permission of Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved

I Wanted Only A Little

I wanted, I thought, only a little,

two teaspoons of silence—

one for sugar,

one for stirring the wetness.

No.

I wanted a Cairo of silence,

a Kyoto.

In every hanging garden

mosses and waters.

The directions of silence:

north, west, south, past, future.

It comes through any window

one inch open,

like rain driven sideways.

Grief shifts,

as a grazing horse does,

one leg to the other.

But a horse sleeping

sleeps with all legs locked.

Jane Hirshfield

(MacDowell, 2012; in The Beauty, Knopf 2015)

Used by permission of Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved

A Chair in Snow

A chair in snow

should be

like any other object whited

& rounded

and yet a chair in snow is always sad

more than a bed

more than a hat or house

a chair is shaped for just one thing

to hold

a soul its quick and few bendable

hours

perhaps a king

not to hold snow

not to hold flowers

Jane Hirshfield

(MacDowell, 2012; in The Beauty, Knopf 2015)

Used by permission of Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved

I Cast My Hook, I Decide to Make Peace

The bee does not speak to me.

The whale does not speak to me.

The horse is silent.

History does not speak to me.

Arachne is only a spider.

Nothing says “you” if I offer “I,”

“I” if I proffer “you.”

I would go

to the Counter of Complaining—

there was one,

a hut of new pine wood

at the base of the Yellow Mountains in China,

the door was open, a woman sat in the chair—

but nothing says “counter,”

nothing says “yellow” or “mountain.”

Erased dust of the chalkboard, barnacle,

less sleep than bed—

what can I do, faceless, with no one to kiss or shout at?

I cast my hook, my vote against it,

I decide to make peace.

I declare this intention but nothing answers.

And so I put peace in a warm place, towel-covered, to proof,

then into an oven. I wait.

Peace is patient and undemanding, it surpasseth.

And the bulldozers move

from the places of breaking to the places of building.

And the students return to their classes.

Tuna swim freely.

The sky hoists the flag of the sky.

All this in the space of a half-page, a little ink,

a small bite of hubris

sweetened with raisins and honey.

I begin to consider what I will make of tomorrow’s speechless.

Jane Hirshfield

(MacDowell, 2012; in The Beauty, Knopf 2015)

Used by permission of Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved

Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom

In certain styles of Chinese painting,

three diagonal brush strokes balance a mountain.

Like that, the word for happiness

keeps inside it the word for chance. For haplessness, also.

You wanted to be ignorant, unknowing, thunderstruck, gobsmacked.

Wanted to be brought to your knees

by the scent of mushrooms you couldn’t know whether to pick.

When the violent, brilliant goshawk,

excessive and unforgiving, drove you from her nesting,

she battered your head with its own blunt weight of animal being.

The big, deaf bear in both lanes of the dark

was a grandmother’s fake pearl necklace suddenly real.

You ate the stories of others

because your own were already inside you and you were still hungry.

You wanted to sleep in a house you could walk the outside of,

windowed and simple, and find on it one day a door—

green-peeling, padlocked—you’d never guessed at.

You found the house, you entered, ate there, slept.

But however you rummaged and plundered the inside,

that door, that blind-hinged door, kept opening elsewhere.

Jane Hirshfield

(MacDowell, 2012; in The Beauty, Knopf 2015)

Used by permission of Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved