“Burlap Sack,” Jane Hirshfield

A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stonework sand.
We say, “Hand me the sack,”
but we get the weight.
Heavier if it got left out in the rain.
To think that the sand or stones is the self is an error.
To think that grief is the self is an error.
Self carries the grief as a facsimile carries the side bags,
being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
The self is not the load of ropes and nails and axes.
The self is not the miner nor builder nor diver.
What would it be to take the bride
and leave behind the heavy dowry?
To let the thin-eared mule browse the tall grasses,
it’s long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?

“Termites: An Assay,” Jane Hirshfield

So far the house is still standing.
So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster
still debate, in Socratic unhurt, what constitutes a good life.
An almost readable language.
Like the radio heard while travelling in. A foreign country–
you know that something important has happened, but not what.

“The Monk Stood Beside a Wheelbarrow,” Jane Hirshfield

The monk stood beside a wheelbarrow, weeping.

God or Buddha nowhere to be seen–
these tears were fully human,
bitter, broken,
falling onto the wheelbarrow’s rusty side.

They gathered at its bottom,
To make more rust.

You cannot know what you do in this life, what you have done.

The monk stood weeping.
I knew I also had a place on this hard earth.

“Seawater Stiffens Cloth,” Jane Hirschfield

Seawater stiffens cloth long after it’s dried.
As pain after it’s ended stays in the body:
A woman moves her hands oddly
because her grandfather passed through
a place he never spoke of. Making
instead the old jokes with angled fingers.
Call one thing another’s name long enough,
it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.
Call it a tree whose shape of branches happened.
Call what branching happened a man
whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.
Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples,
to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking.
Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence.

“Sheep,” Jane Hirshfield

It is the work of feeling
to undo expectation.

A black-faced sheep
looks back at you as you pass
and your heart is startled
as if by the shadow
of someone once loved.

Neither comforted by this
nor made lonely.

Only remembering
that a self in exile is still a self,
as a bell unstruck for years
is still a bell.