jane hirshfield poems
eddies grrl
Posts: 509
rebus
you work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubborness going on after.
clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers, or dust.
each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
there are no honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
the clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.
this rebus- slip and stubborness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life-
when will i learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
not to understand it, only to see.
as water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.
the ladder leans into its darkness.
the anvil leans into its silence.
the cup sits empty.
how can i answer this question the clay has asked?
[size=-5](colors added by me)[/size]
you work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubborness going on after.
clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers, or dust.
each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
there are no honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
the clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.
this rebus- slip and stubborness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life-
when will i learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
not to understand it, only to see.
as water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.
the ladder leans into its darkness.
the anvil leans into its silence.
the cup sits empty.
how can i answer this question the clay has asked?
[size=-5](colors added by me)[/size]
Life is the riddle
Of which we're caught in the middle.
A couple of lucky ones
Tangled up in too much love
~cowboy junkies
Of which we're caught in the middle.
A couple of lucky ones
Tangled up in too much love
~cowboy junkies
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i have envied those
who make something
useful, sturdy-
a chair, a pair of boots
even a soup,
rich with potatoes and cream.
or those who fix, perhaps,
a leaking window:
strip out the old cracked putty,
lay down cleanly the line of the new.
you could learn,
the mirror tells me, late at night,
but lacks conviction.
one reflected eyebrow quivers a little.
i look at this
borrowed apartment-
everywhere i question it,
the wallpaper's pattern matches.
yesterday a woman
showed me
a building shaped
like the overturned hull of a ship,
its roof trusses, under the plaster,
lashed with soaked rawhide,
the columns' marble
painted to seem like wood.
or possibly it was the other way around?
i look at my unhandy hand,
innocent,
shaped as the hands of others are shaped.
even the pen it holds is a mystery, really.
rawhide, it writes,
and chair, and marble.
eyebrow.
later the woman asked me-
i recognized her then,
my sister, my own young self-
does a poem change the world,
or only our idea of the world?
how do you take one from the other,
i lied, or did not lie,
in answer.
[size=-5]bold added by me[/size]
Of which we're caught in the middle.
A couple of lucky ones
Tangled up in too much love
~cowboy junkies
edit for typo!
Of which we're caught in the middle.
A couple of lucky ones
Tangled up in too much love
~cowboy junkies
The first time I came across the American poet Jane Hirshfield(b. 1953- ) was in 2002, three years after I retired from full-time work and just after going on a disability pension. I was 58. By 2002 I had begun to slowly drop the casual and volunteer work that had replaced my full-time employment in 1999, that had allowed me to slowly make an exit from the world of external and community commitments and that had come to prevent me from devoting the kind of attention and time I wanted to writing and study.
I had already begun to study poetry more seriously in 1989 when teaching matric English Literature and by 2002 I had notes on several dozen poets. My book on the poetry of Roger White had been approved in 2002 and was soon to go online at the Juxta Publications website. In 2002 I read an interview with Hirschfield and had made a page of notes on her thoughts about and her approach to poetry. Then, this week, five years later, as I was reading these notes and organizing my interviews with poets file I was struck by some of her comments. So I photocopied several pieces from the internet about her: two interviews, two reviews of her work, a journal article, a page of her prose, several of her poems and a bio-data sheet.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 24 October 2007.
You said so many things, Jane,
which made such perfect sense
even though you came to them
by such a different road than I.
Not knowing where a poem is
going and moving into mystery
as one takes one’s life in hand,
puts it all into the poem making
life anew, from self to world,
reexperiencing, magnifying,
clarifying, savoring the journey,
its irresistible seduction, weaving
a world by language, seriousness,
silence, attention and a curious
knowing-inhabiting-staying with
what comes up from inside being.
After a lifetime, more than 60 years
of immersion in the life of the world,
I finally immerse myself in a deep
and profound silence filled with new
and wonderful configurations that
have been cast in every epoch on
the mirror of creation, embellished
with a fresh grace, an ever-varying
splendour deriving from thought.
Ron Price 24 October 2007
she is a hottie
damn mods, that was bullshit!