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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.

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
Senses
Mouths
Chili
Imagination
Peppers
Mind
Explode
Think
Metaphors
Thinking
Metaphor
Hot
Mouth

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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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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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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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Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.
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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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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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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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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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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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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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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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History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.
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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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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
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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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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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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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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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