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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.

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
Rooms
Carrie
Tree
Extra
Leave
Extras
Side
Bags
Mule
Sides
Trees
Mules
Self
Careful
Pack
Grief
Packs
Room
Carries

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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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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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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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The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils 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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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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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be Yes. The next words: And then.
Jane Hirshfield
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.
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The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
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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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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
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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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