Quotes from Jane Hirshfield

Almost I took you as husband, love. Then you left me. I took surprise for husband instead.

The Mountain One moment, the mountain is clear in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog. I returned to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again from my reading and find in the window moonlight - but when I do, the fog is still there, and only the ancient poet's hair has turned gray while a single wild goose passed him, silently climbing.

A person falling does not, mid-plummet, look up.

Only remembering that a self in exile is still a self, as a bell unstruck for years is still a bell.

I moved my chair into sun I sat in the sun The way hunger is moved when called fasting

I wake to a simple longing, all I want of this ordinary hour, this ordinary earth that was long ago married to time: to hear as a sand crab hears the waves, loud as a second heart; to see as a green thing sees the sun, with the undividing attention of blind love. — Jane Hirshfield, from "Rain in May," Of Gravity & Angels . (Wesleyan; 1 edition February 15, 1988)

However many holes are in you, always there's room for another. However much you carry, you can hold more. "My Corkboard

What is usual is not what is always. As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back. Footsteps resume their clipped edges, birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear. Where were they? By what route did they return? A woman mute for years forms one perfect sentence before she dies.

Like Others In the end, I was like others. A person. Sometimes embarrassed, sometimes afraid. When "Fire!" was shouted, some ran toward it, some away— I neck-deep among them.

What surprises, etymology tells us, is what is "beyond grasp." Even the mind of the author cannot seem to keep what has been found: great poems exceed their creators. They are more capacious, capricious, compassionate, original, witty, strange, avaricious for beauty and range. The writer's life, the historical times, do not make the art. Art makes art.

Only words that enlarge the realm of the possible merit borrowing our attention from the world of the actual and the living.

he is like a soldier or a saint: blank-faced, and given wholly to an obedience he does not need to understand.

THIS RIPENESS Thin roads splice field to field in the early light; under the trees, many pears lie opening to the ground. This ripeness is the landscape I want, a hand on the kitchen table passing from sunlight to shadow, warm wood to cool, and back, behind me the bright jars ranked on their shelves—harvest of rutted lanes, too small for naming, that lead, one to another, through the day.

SLEEPING Here, we are one geography: every part of us inked on a map where, across all the blue waters, continents' edges inexplicably match. I move closer to you in the dark, feel the slow heat that embers you deeper into the night. Where all fires descend a few hours into their own slow-dreaming hearts. Where the ravine hides in its own steepness no matter how long, how fiercely we love.

My Hunger The way the high-wire walker must carry a pole to make her arms longer you carried me I carried you through this world.

The self in exile remains the self, as a bell unstruck for years is still a bell.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.

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.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

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.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.