Quote

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

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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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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.
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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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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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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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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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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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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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Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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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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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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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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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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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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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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