• selected poems by Jane Hirshfield

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• A Chair in Snow:
• "A chair in snow / should be / like any other object whited / & rounded / and yet a chair in snow is always sad / more than a bed / more than a hat or house / a chair is shaped for just one thing / to hold / a soul its quick and few bendable / hours / perhaps a king / not to hold snow / not to hold flowers"

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• For What Binds Us:
• "There are names for what binds us: / strong forces, weak forces. / -- / 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."

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• Meeting the Light Completely:
• "Even the long-beloved / was once / an unrecognized stranger. / Just so, / the chipped lip / of a blue-glazed cup, / blown field / of a yellow curtain, / might also, / flooding and falling, / ruin your heart. / A table painted with roses. / An empty clothesline. / Each time, / the found world surprises— / that is its nature. / And then / what is said by all lovers: / 'What fools we were, not to have seen.'"

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• My Species:
• "even / a small purple artichoke / boiled / in its own bittered / and darkening / waters / grows tender, / grows tender and sweet / patience, I think, / my species / keep testing the spiny leaves / the spiny heart"

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• My Weather:
• "Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious, / restless, stunned, relieved. / Does a tree also? / A mountain? / A cup holds / sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air. / I hold these."

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• To Judgment: An Assay:
• " You change a life / as eating an artichoke changes the taste / of whatever is eaten after. / Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat— / not objectively present at all— / and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow: / to know if the distance between two things can be leapt. / The piano, that good servant, / has none of you in her at all, she lends herself / to what asks; this has been my ambition as well. / Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot / whose water comes from far-off mountain springs. / Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow, / coldly delicious. / For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn’t mind, / not judgment. Teeth pass. Pain passes. / Judgment decrees what remains— / the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment / of a boy-king entering Persia: “Burn it,” he says, / and it burns. And if a small tear swells the corner / of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him than a beetle / fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children. / The biologist Haldane—in one of his tenderer moments— / judged beetles especially loved by God, / “because He had made so many.” For judgment can be tender: / I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever / carries the quail. Yet however much / I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you: / you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth. / When I have erased you from me entirely, / disrobed of your measuring adjectives, / stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns, / when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter— / not beautiful, not cold, only the color of butter— / then perhaps I will love you. Helpless to not. / As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk, / find it sweet."

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• Sentencings:
• "As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves, / we listen to the murmuring dead."
• "Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely."

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• Works & Loves:
• "Rain fell as a glass / breaks, / something suddenly everywhere at the same time."
• "The grief / of what hasn’t yet happened — / a door closed from inside. / The weight of the grass / dividing / an ant’s five-legged silence / walking through it."
• "“I was once.” / Said not in self-pity or praise. / This dignity we allow barn owl, / ego, oyster."