its own beauty

The world is no more than the Beloved's single face;

In the desire of the One to know its own beauty, we exist.

Each place, each moment, sings its particular song of not-being and being.

Without reason, the clear glass equally mirrors wisdom and madness.

Those who claim knowledge are wrong; prayer just leads to trance;

Appearance and faith are mere lees in the Unknowing Wine.

Wherever the Footprint is found,

the handful of dust holds the oneness of worlds.  

This earth, burnished by hearing the Name, is so certain of Love

That the sky bends unceasingly down, to greet its own light.

Ghalib

Translated by Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers

home

reciting poems in the moonlight,

riding a painted boat...

every place the wind carries me is home.  

Yu Xuanji (A.D. 843-868)

tr. Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers

The Adamantine Perfection of Desire

Nothing more strong
than to be helpless before desire.

No reason,
the simplified heart whispers,
the argument over,
only This.

No longer choosing anything but assent.

Its bowl scraped clean to the bottom,
the skull-bone cup no longer horrifies,
but, rimmed in silver, shines.

A spotted dog follows a bitch in heat.
Gray geese flying past us, crying.
The living cannot help but love the world.





Jane Hirshfield
Photo:  Peter Bowers

In My Wallet I Carry a Card

In my wallet I carry a card
which declares I have the power to marry.

In my wallet I carry a card
which declares I may drive.

In my wallet I carry a card
that says to a merchant I may be trusted to pay her.

In my wallet I carry a card
that states I can borrow a book in the town where I live.

In my hand I carry a card.
Its lines declare I am cardless,  carless,
stateless, and have no money.

It is buoyant and edgeless.
It names me one of the Order of All Who Will Die.





Jane Hirshfield
Photo:  Peter Bowers

A Cottony Fate

Long ago, someone
told me: avoid or.

It troubles the mind
as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog.

Now I too am sixty.
There was no other life.





Jane Hirshfield
Photo:  Peter Bowers

the grip of life

Say "death" and the whole room freezes--

even the couches stop moving,

even the lamps.

Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously,

and things begin to go forward.

Your life takes on

the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it, hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,

it becomes another syllable.

A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.

Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.

neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,

each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.

(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers

song of not-being and being

The world is no more than the Beloved's single face;

In the desire of the One to know its own beauty, we exist.

Each place, each moment, sings its particular song of not-being and being.

Without reason, the clear glass equally mirrors wisdom and madness.

Those who claim knowledge are wrong; prayer just leads to trance;

Appearance and faith are mere lees in the Unknowing Wine.

Wherever the Footprint is found,

the handful of dust holds the oneness of worlds.  

This earth, burnished by hearing the Name, is so certain of Love

That the sky bends unceasingly down, to greet its own light.

Ghalib

Translated by Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Lake and Maple

I want to give myself

utterly

as this maple

that burned and burned

for three days without stinting

and then in two more

dropped off every leaf;

as this lake that,

no matter what comes

to its green-blue depths,

both takes and returns it.

In the still heart that refuses nothing,

the world is twice-born—

two earths wheeling,

two heavens,

two egrets reaching

down into subtraction;

even the fish

for an instant doubled,

before it is gone.

I want the fish.

I want the losing it all

when it rains and I want

the returning transparence.

I want the place

by the edge-flowers where

the shallow sand is deceptive,

where whatever

steps in must plunge,

and I want that plunging.

I want the ones

who come in secret to drink

only in early darkness,

and I want the ones

who are swallowed.

I want the way

the water sees without eyes,

hears without ears,

shivers without will or fear

at the gentlest touch.

I want the way it

accepts the cold moonlight

and lets it pass,

the way it lets

all of it pass

without judgment or comment.

There is a lake,

Lalla Ded sang, no larger

than one seed of mustard,

that all things return to.

O heart, if you

will not, cannot, give me the lake,

then give me the song.

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Standing Deer

As the house of a person

in age sometimes grows cluttered

with what is

too loved or too heavy to part with,

the heart may grow cluttered.

And still the house will be emptied,

and still the heart.

As the thoughts of a person

in age sometimes grow sparer,

like a great cleanness come into a room,

the soul may grow sparer;

one sparrow song carves it completely.

And still the room is full,

and still the heart.

Empty and filled,

like the curling half-light of morning,

in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty, 

like the curling half-light of evening,

in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Beloved, what can be, what was,

will be taken from us.

I have disappointed.

I am sorry.  I knew no better. 

A root seeks water.

Tenderness only breaks open the earth.

This morning, out the window,

the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.  

Jane Hirshfield

Within this tree

Within this tree

another tree

inhabits the same body; 

within this stone 

another stone rests, 

its many shades of grey

the same, 

its identical surface and weight.

And within my body, 

another body

whose history, waiting, 

sings:  there is no other body, 

it sings, 

there is no other world.  

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers

The Task

It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.

We wake into it daily - open eyes, braid hair - 

a robe unfurled

in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.

And yes, it is a simple enough task

we've taken on,

though also vast; 

from dusk to dawn,

from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not

be blinded by the praising.

To lie like a cat in hot

sun, fur fully blazing,

and dream the mouse;

and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch

within the deep rooms of the house,

where the leaf-flocked

sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms. 

Jane Hirshfield

When your life looks back

When your life looks back - 

as it will, at itself, at you - what will it say ? 

Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool.

Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from.

Bay leaf.  Oak leaf.  Cricket.  One among many.

Your life will carry you as it did always,

with ten fingers and both palms,

with horizontal ribs and upright spine,

with its filling and emptying heart,

that wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled,

in return.

You gave it.  What else could you do?

Immersed in air or in water.

Immersed in hunger or anger.

Curious even when bored.

Longing even when running away.

"What will happen next ?" - 

the question hinged in your knees, your ankles,

in the in-breaths even of weeping.

Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in.

Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face.

No back of the world existed,

no unseen corner, no test.  No other earth to prepare for.  

This, your life had said, its only pronoun.

Here, your life had said, its only house. 

Let, your life had said, its only order. 

And did you have a choice in this?  You did - 

Sleeping and waking, 

The horses around you, the mountains around you, 

The buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts.

Those of  your own kind around you - 

A few times, you stood on your head.

A few times, you chose not to be frightened.

A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure.

Mortal, your life will say,

As if tasting something delicious, as if in envy.

Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving.  

Jane Hirshfield

image:  Peter Bowers

A Room

A room does not turn its back on grief.
Anger does not excite it.
Before desire, it neither responds
nor draws back in fear.


Without changing expression
it takes
and gives back;
not a tuft in the mattress alters.


Windowsills evenly welcome
both heat and cold.
Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.

Doors are not equivocal.
floorboards do not hesitate or startle.
Impatience does not stir the curtains,
a bed is neither irritable or rapacious.

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room
we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,
pointing to hinge and plaster and wood -

You are matter, as they are.
See how perfectly it can be done.
Hold, one day more, what is asked.





Jane Hirshfield
From:  Lives of the Heart
Photo:  Peter Bowers

Three Times My Life Has Opened

Three times my life has opened.

Once, into darkness and rain.

Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and

starts to remember each time it enters the act of love.

Once, to the fire that holds all.

These three were not different.

You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.

But outside my window all day a maple has stepped

from her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping

the colored silks.

Neither are we different in what we know.

There is a door.  It opens.  Then it is closed.  But a slip of

light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,

or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:   Peter Bowers

Ripeness

Ripeness is

what falls away with ease.

Not only the heavy apple,

the pear,

but also the dried brown strands

of autumn iris from their core.

To let your body

love this world

that gave itself to your care

in all of its ripeness,

with ease,

and will take itself from you

in equal ripeness and ease,

is also harvest.

And however sharply

you are tested -

this sorrow, that great love -

it too will leave on that clean knife.

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers



"A Carbon-Based Life Form"

A person tired from happiness grows sober.

Another, worn through

by sadness, stumbles into a kind of joy.

It is like a dog alone in a house, barking to hear its own kind.

Nothing needs to be added.  Yet we do.

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers



Only when I am quiet and do not speak

Only when I am quiet for a long time

and do not speak

do the objects of my life draw near.

Shy, the scissors and spoons, the blue mug.

Hesitant even the towels,

for all their intimate knowledge and scent of fresh bleach.

How steady their regard as they ponder,

dreaming and waking,

the entrancement of my daily wanderings and tasks.

Drunk on the honey of feelings, the honey of purpose,

they seem to be thinking,

a quiet judgment that glistens between the glass doorknobs.

Yet theirs is not the false reserve

of a scarcely concealed ill-will,

nor that other, active shying:  of pelted rocks.

No, not that.  For I hear the sigh of happiness

each object gives off

if I glimpse for even an instant the actual instant -

As if they believed it possible

I might join

their circle of simple, passionate thusness,

their hidden rituals of luck and solitude,

the joyous gap in them where appears in us the pronoun I.

Jane Hirshfield

A Day Comes

A day comes

when the mouth grows tired

of saying "I."

Yet it is occupied

still by a self which must speak.

Which still desires,

is curious.

Which believes it has also a right.

What to do?

The tongue consults with the teeth

it knows will survive

both mouth and self,

which grin - it is their natural pose -

and say nothing.

Jane Hirshfield

from After

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books --

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Metempsychosis

Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off --
the immeasurable's continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further.

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers