Because the past, too, may hold beauty . . .

This Was Once a Love Poem
Jane Hirshfield

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

It spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.

When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them-one, then another-
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

A hand is not . . .

A Hand
Jane Hirshfield

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink.

The maple's green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

After days of silence,

which I am blaming on conditions alongside the road, I return to the online world to find that a member of one circle has birthed a child. Here, words from another member of said ring. (I look at my circles and know myself to be more than fortunate.)

Spell for Inviting-in the New Soul
Jane Hirshfield

Shy one,
small donkey, come forward.
Let world be cradle.

Fish drifting, enter weight gladly.
Trust passage.

If suffering will chant you,
if terror,
in pine dark, deer breathing.
In sea-bench's sorrow gills salt-light.

Know owl-cries your forelock.

Know leaf-scent, know cities, know rivers,
doorways stand open.
In ice-grip, know muskrat's strong swimming.
Let asking.

Let losing and breaking, let weather.
Let entrance entirely.
Desires bray sweet in the ladders of loudness.

Shy one, small donkey, trust hoof-fall.
Seeds wait to ride on your ankles,
five baskets
of apple sleep guardian.

The bridle placed heavy wears bell-sounds.
Agreeing come forward.

Marred Perfection

For What Binds Us
Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --

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.

§

Not everything that builds a strong and beautiful relationship is easy. There are shelves of books of poetry praising the light, the lovely and the simple, the eternal honeymoon phase of an unlikely love.

Hirshfield graces love with recognition of its labour, with something greater than an acknowledgement of the powerful links forged of pain and forgiveness, fired by history.

Fluff and fancy, sweetness and new sensuality are all well and good, but the other, the hard-earned connection won and won again -- that is real love, faith tried and tested and proven, in the long run, to endure. It has scars and bumps flaws -- is a human thing -- and it has glory beyond measure precisely because of those old, tenderly healed wounds.

No Forgetting

a poem by Izumi Shikibu
At the Temple Ceremony for Her Departed Daughter
translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani

Unendurable grief.
For not so brief an instant
as that between the notes
of the monk's bell
will I forget you.