The shoes put on each time
left first, then right.
The morning potion's teaspoon
of sweetness stirred always
for seven circlings -- no fewer, no more --
into the cracked blue cup.
Touching the pocket for wallet,
for keys,
before closing the door.
How did we come
to believe these small rituals' promise,
that we are today the selves we yesterday knew,
tomorrow will be?
How intimate and unthinking,
the way the toothbrush is shaken dry after use,
the part we wash first in the bath.
Which habits we learned from others
and which are ours alone we may never know.
Unbearable to acknowledge
how much they are themselves our fated life.
Open the traveling suitcase --
There the beloved red sweater,
bright tangle of necklace, earrings of amber.
Each confirming I chose these, I.
But habit is different: it chooses.
And we, its good horse,
opening our mouths at even the sight of the bit.
-- Jane Hirshfield
Rebus
You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care of 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 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 stubbornness,
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 enter this question the clay has asked?
-- Jane Hirshfield
Button
It likes both to enter and to leave,
actions it seems to feel as a kind of hide-and-seek.
It knows, nothing of what the cloth believes
of its magus-like powers.
If fastening and unfasting are its nature,
it doesn't care about its nature.
It likes the caress of two fingers
against its slightly thickened edges.
It likes the scent and heat of the proximate body.
The exhilaration of the washing is its wild pleasure.
Amoralist, sensualist, dependent of cotton thread,
its sleep is curled like a cat to a patch of sun,
calico and round.
Its understanding is the understanding
of honey and jasmine, of letting what happens come.
A button envies no neighboring button,
no snap, no knot, no polyester-braided toggle.
It rests on its red-checked shirt in serene disregard.
It is its own story, completed.
Brevity and longevity mean nothing to a button carved of horn.
Nor do old dreams of passion disturb it,
though once it wandered the ten thousand grasses
with the musk-fragrance caught in its nostrils;
though once it followed -- it did -- that wind for miles.
-- Jane Hirshfield
Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand
Like and ant carrying her bits of leaf or sand,
the poem carries its words.
Moving one, then another, into place.
Something in an ant is sure where these morsels belong,
but the ant could not explain this.
Something in a poem is cerrtain where its words belong,
but the poet could not explain this.
All day the ant obeys an inexplicable order.
All day the poet obeys an incomprehensible demand.
The world changes of does not change by these labors;
the geode peeled open gives off its cold scent or does not.
But that is no concern of the ant's, of the poem's.
The work of existence devours its own unfolding.
What dissolves will dissolve --
you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.
The potato's sugary hunger for growing larger.
The unblinking heat of the tiger.
No thimble of cloud or stone that will not vanish,
and still the rearrangements continue.
The ant's work belongs to the ant.
The poen carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.
-- Jane Hirshfield
Bone
The living dog
has found the old dog's toy.
She brings it to the kitchen,
the blue rubber a little cracked
from all that time ourside.
My memories,
my counting and expectations,
mean nothing to her;
my sadness, though,
does puzzle her a moment.
Then she keeps on chewing.
Time's instruments are thumb piano,
oboe, ocarina, flute, and dog.
Its moveents
run through her body flawlessly.
Only we sing with a catch in the throat.
She hears the thought. -- "Catch?"
She's ready.
The Fool:
A Letter to Paul Hansen
When Bodhidharma
came from the West, for nine years
he sat, face-to-wall.
A studen asked old Yang-chi,
"What could this posibly mean?"
"He was Indian,"
Yang-chi replied with a grin,
"he spoke no Chinese."
Chuang Tzu says , "If you follow
dictates of an accomplished
heart,then you have found
a teacher. And who can fail
to find a master?"
When I set out for Yueh,
I never dreamed I would find
myself in shadows
of ancient masters whose trails
wind ever deeper
into dark mountain shadows
before the burgeoning dawn.
"He who knows enough
to stop at what he does not
truly know is there."
Well, old friend, let me be first
to confess to wandering
still. The world is filled
with scholars who do not know
that the poetry
is only glimpsed through the words
like a lover undressing
behind the shoji
screen, her lovely silouette
misaken for her
body. Poetry is not
the fact of her living flesh
nor the old longing
stirred in the loins by a glimpse
of neck-nape or breast.
The poem is shaped by words
the accomplished heart holds dear,
and, composed by ear,
says much more than words can sa.
Take away the words,
and there is still poetry.
Facts merely get in the way.
I have surrendered
to the mystery of it all.
My face to the wall,
mountains and revers remain.
I am a fool, Paul, to have
thought for a moment
I could stop the moon mid-sky,
that I could embrace,
if only for a moment,
the moon reflected in your eye.
And yer I persist
as the trail winds more deeply --
as I am aptly named:
Obaka-san the Pilgrim,
a happy fool following
the light reflected
by the eyes of ancient fools,
crumbling old Buddhas,
Taoist loonies -- to the point:
people who are just like you.
Sam Hamill.
The Nets
Somewhere someone is untangling
the heavy nets of desire
beside a small fire at the edge of the sea.
He works slowly, fingers bleeding,
half thinking, half listening, knowing
only that the sea makes him thirsty.
Sam Hamill.