Readings: Brilliant Nuggets

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From a piece titled “Fifteen Pebbles” in Jane Hirshfield’s wonderful new poetry collection, Come, Thief, here are my favorite two of the fifteen:


Hunger

xxxA red horse crops grass.xxx
xxxA black crow
xxxdelves bugs from a dirt pile.
xxxA woman watches in envy what is so simple.


Paint

xxxWhat we see is the paint.
xxxYet somehow the mind
xxxknows the wall,
xxxas the living know death.


You should get the book and read the other thirteen.
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Readings: Jane Hirshfield Strikes Again

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Lion and Angel Dividing the Maple Between Them

Easy to see
that the lion and angel
are one visitation,
but how do you come
to offer your throat to either?
In autumn, the trees
learn to drop off
both their disguises,
what finally fills them is simple.
The heart's deepest
affections will equally be devoured.
And still we go ankle deep
into that carnage, lifting first one,
then another part up to the light.
As if we were looking for something simple.
As if what we wanted
were not the thing that falls. ~ Jane Hirshfield, The Lives of the Heart


And so we learn over and over again, in pain, that human relationships can be domesticated only by a steady diet of benign lies. One nourishes the beast on truth only to give it strength enough to leap up and tear out one's throat. I ain't lyin'.
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Readings: a Whole Fragment

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These are the last five lines of a poem entitled "A Room" by Jane Hirshfield. There are seventeen lines preceding these five; but they stand quite well alone:

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,
pointing to hinge and plaster and wood --

xxxYou are matter, as they are.
xxxSee how perfectly it can be done.
xxxHold, one day more, what is asked.
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Readings: a Poem by Jane Hirshfield...

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...from her collection The Lives of the Heart:

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.
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Readings: Bearing It All

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I really like this poem by Jane Hirshfield from her book Of Gravity & Angels:

EVENING, LATE FALL

It is not this world, then, to blame, with its red
and blue stars, yellow pears, green apples
that carry a scent which can move you to tears.
The others are not unlike this—
the women stand over sinks with their sleeves pushed back,
thin oxen lean into their yokes,
snow falls with impossible lightness in spring.
How do we bear it, then, to guess sometimes
at their lives across the dark?
How they sing as they run cotton towels across porcelain plates?
How they are innocent?
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