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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging 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
Horse
Life
Plunging
Gate
Gates

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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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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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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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Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.
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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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I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.
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Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.
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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.
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