something out in the dark...

After


Jane Hirshfield


(Harper Collins, 2006)







Against Certainty

There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.
Each time I think “this,” it answers “that.”
Answers hard, in the heart-grammar’s strictness.

If I then say “that,” it too is taken away.

Between certainty and the real, and ancient enmity.
When the cat waits in the path-hedge,
no cell of her body is not waiting.
This is how she is able so completely to disappear.

I would like to enter the silence portion as she does.

To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live,
one shadow fully at ease inside another.

*

If you can only read one collection of poetry this year... let it be Jane Hirshfield’s After. Her poems prod, disturb, awaken – each page, an experience.

“To live amid the great vanishing” – That notion will carry me the rest of my life. Entering the silence – yes – is the way to develop most fully as identity, as writer, as being.