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

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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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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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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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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
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I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.
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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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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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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
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