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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

Jane Hirshfield

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Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Mesh
Fine
Almost
Death

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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
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It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard.
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.
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How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
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A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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In the dream life you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.
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A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.
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A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.
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Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
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The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
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Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
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