"Counting, This New Year's Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me"

1 January 2022: Feeling too ambivalent to do a "reflection" or "looking ahead" post. Quiet day. Big Thoughts. 

So I'll cheat and let a poem do some speaking for me, specifically this one, by Jane Hirschfield. It captures the sadness, tiredness, gratitude, wonder, and bit of hope that I feel. An excerpt:

"I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea, 

brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. 

Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder. 

Today, I woke without answer. 

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don't despair of this falling world, not yet

didn't it give you the asking"

Also completely charmed by this one...

"February 29"

29 February 2016: Leap Day's good thing is this post by Katy Waldman about "February 29," a poem by Jane Hirschfield. Great poem; lovely analysis. I really like this part:

"The poem’s spare, unassuming images (someone stumbling after he’s had too much to drink, a cracked door) gracefully bear the weight of abstract ideas. Hirshfield compares the leap day to a small consolation, a little more time with someone you’ve lost: 'a letter re-readable after its writer has died.' (Notice how gently her two rooms, illuminated and dark, stand in for life and death.) Throughout, the poet underscores the sweetness of this small cosmic excess, unnecessary, unremarkable, but inspirited in the same way a space feels inspirited by light, or by a person passing through it."

"The Envoy"

"The Envoy"

Jane Hirschfield

 

One day in that room, a small rat.   

Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,

whipped the long stripe of his   

body under the bed,

then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don’t know how either came or left.   

Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched

as something—terror? happiness? grief?—

entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,   

Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.   

It slept where light could not go.

Its scent was neither snake nor rat,   

neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives   

of which we know nothing.

Through them

the belled herds travel at will,

long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

Two poems...

Things are a bit strange around here these days. There is, after all, so much going on and at the same time, so little. The move is soon (very soon!) and along with that comes all these emotions: anxiety, excitement, even a bit of sadness over leaving this old apartment, and the general feeling of unease that comes from being unsettled. Part of me wants to go to sleep and wake up on moving day. Part of me wants to freeze the clock.

Moreover, it's been so very quiet these last couple of weeks. That's good and bad, I suppose. I like the time I've had to get work done--reading, writing, taking notes, working on my article and conference paper. Being able to do those tasks uninterrupted (without even classes to teach)and realizing that it is my actual job to do these things is, of course, quite wonderful.

And yet sometimes it gets lonely--loneliness exasperated by that lack of teaching I mentioned above and the day-to-day busy-ness of the semester. I find myself missing lots of people and wondering where in the world the summer has gone. Classes start in less than a month, which is (yes, you guessed it) good and bad. I thought I'd have a chance to do more and to see more people. It's hard to shut my brain off at night--I just lay there thinking and planning and worrying and thinking and...well, you get the point.

Anyway, all of this is a long set-up for an (admittedly somewhat pedantic) point about the poems below and poetry in general: when I found them (on the "Poem of the Day" podcast), for a moment, they kind of lifted me away from all of that stuff I've listed above but then dropped me back in that world feeling somewhat better, or at least, somewhat different. And that's very cool.

1) "Pumpernickel" by Philip Schultz. This one goes a place I didn't really see coming--takes us from bread-making to poetry writing and reminds us what both arts do--and why we do them. That last line is just amazing. Oh, and it inspired me to bake some bread this afternoon.

Monday mornings Grandma rose an hour early to make rye,
onion & challah, but it was pumpernickel she broke her hand for,
pumpernickel that demanded cornmeal, ripe caraway, mashed potatoes
& several Old Testament stories about patience & fortitude & for
which she cursed in five languages if it didn't pop out fat
as an apple-cheeked peasant bride. But bread, after all,
is only bread & who has time to fuss all day & end up
with a dead heart if it flops? Why bother? I'll tell you why.
For the moment when the steam curls off the black crust like a strip
of pure sunlight & the hard oily flesh breaks open like a poem
pulling out of its own stubborn complexity a single glistening truth
& who can help but wonder at the mystery of the human heart when you
hold a slice up to the light in all its absurd splendor & I tell you
we must risk everything for the raw recipe of our passion.

2) "Tree" by Jane Hirshfield. Perhaps I related to this one because of the upcoming move and packing up (and thinking a lot about) my own "clutter of soup pots and books." Things that, even as I carefully wrap them in paper and bubblewrap, seem so minor, so unsubstantial, when "immensity taps at your life."

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.