from Nine Gates

I'm living inside some words by Jane Hirshfield – her essay, "Poetry and the Mind of Concentration":

"One way poetry connects is across time. Saying a poem aloud ... our bodies as well as our minds enter the rhythms present at the poem's conception. We breathe as the author breathed, we move our own tongue and teeth and throat in the ways they moved in the poem's first making. There is a startling intimacy to this. Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem; if the poem is our own, it is our own past the reinhabits our bodies, at least in part. Shaped language is strangely immortal, living in a meadowy freshness outside of time."

This is the dark matter of the universe, as far as I’m concerned – the womb of God – whatever the essence is. Or, as Hirshfield writes, “a startling intimacy.”

Our words, of course, outlive us. But, not just on the page. On the tongue. In the air. In the breath of a body. Beauty of a high order.