I Said
–Jane Hirshfield
I said I believed
a world without you unimaginable.

Now cutting its flowers to go with you into the fire.

Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash 

Brocade
–Jane Hirshfield

All day wondering
if I’ve become useless.

All day the osprey
white and black,
carrying
big dry sticks without leaves.

Late, I say to my pride,

You think you’re the feathered part
of this don’t you?

Photo by Karo Kujanpaa on Unsplash

To My Fifties
–Jane Hirshfield

You opened me
as a burglar opens a house with a silent alarm.
I opened you
as a burglar opens a house with a silent alarm.

We knew we had to work quickly,
bears ecstatic, not minding the stinging.

Or say it was this:

We were the wax paper bag
in which something was wrapped.
What was inside us
neither opaque not entirely transparent.
Afterward, we were folded into neat creases.

Or this:

Say we were paired
parentheses
cupping two dates, a hyphen,
and much that continues unspoken.

Say:

We were our own future,
a furnace invented to burn itself up.

Photo by Amruth Pillai on Unsplash

Now a Darkness is Coming

–Jane Hirshfield

Photo by Marika Vinkmann on Unsplash

The Orphan Beauty of Fold Not Made Blindfold

–Jane Hirshfield

Photo by Moa Király on Unsplash

For What Binds Us

–Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

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.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash 

Today, Another Universe
–Jane Hirshfield

The arborist has determined:
senescence         beetles       canker
quickened by drought
but in any case
not prunable     not treatable     not to be propped.

And so.

The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.

The trunk where the ant.

The red squirrels’ eighty foot playground.

The bark  cambium    pine-sap    cluster of needles.

The Japanese patterns       the ink-net.

The dapple on certain fish.

Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.

The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.

Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.

Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,
this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Paint
–Jane Hirshfield

Someone invented this.

If a person
pees on a wall so painted,
the pee splashes back,
wets the pants, soaks the shoes.

Surprise! the wall says.

Someone thought this a good solution.
Someone gave it a color.