Animal Attunement
Three poems by Jane Hirshfield
So much about living can be learned from animals, creatures in our world but not really of our world. Below are three evocative poems from Jane Hirshfield.
Two Kerosene Lanterns
The cat walks the narrow shelf beneath the window
where many delicate things are arranged—polished ammonites,
a dried starfish, three turtle netsuke,
a few curls of birch bark, two long-unused kerosene lanterns
As if on their own, two hands fly up to cover the person’s face,
to cover the eyes already closed.
The crash, as it must, arrives,
The hands lower slowly.
The cat sits on the floor in the room’s middle, calmly licking one paw.
The law of cats is simple: one arrangement becomes another.
People are strange.
Heat
My Mare, when she was in heat,
would travel the fence line for hours,
wearing the impatience
in her feet into the ground.
Not a stallion for miles, I’d assure her,
give it up.
She’s widen her nostrils,
sieve the wind for news, be moving again,
her underbelly darkening with sweat,
then stop at the gate a moment, wait
to see what I might do.
Oh, I knew
how it was for her, easily
recognized myself in that wide lust:
came to stand in the pasture
just to see it played.
Offered a hand, a bucket of grain,
a minute’s distraction from passion
the most I gave.
Then she’d return to what burned her:
the fence, the fence,
so hoping I might see, might let her free.
I’d envy her then,
to be so restlessly sure
of heat, and need, and what it takes
to feed the wanting that we are—
Only a gap to open
the width of a mare,
the rest would take care of itself,
surely, surely I knew that,
who had the power of bucket
and bridle—
she would beseech me, sidle up,
be gone, as life is short.
But desire, desire is long.
Happiness
I think it was from the animals
that St. Francis learned
it is possible to cast oneself
on the earth’s good mercy and live.
From the wolf who cast off
the deep fierceness of her first heart
and crept into the circle of sunlight
wagging her newly-she tail
in full awareness and wolf-hunger,
and was fed, and lived; from the birds
who came fearless to him until he
had no choice but return that courage.
Even the least amoeba touched on all sides
by the opulent Other, even the baleened
plankton fully immersed in their fate—
for what else might happiness be
than to be porous, opened, rinsed through
by the beings and things?
Nor could he forget those other companions,
the shifting, ethereal, shapeless:
Hopelessness, Desperateness, Loneliness,
even the fire-tongued Anger—
For they too waited with the patient Lion,
the glossy Rooster, the drowsy Mule, to step
out of the trees’ protection and come in.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry and two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s deep workings. She is one of America’s central spokespersons for concerns about the biosphere and interconnection. Among Hirshfield’s many honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. Reading her poetry, you can sense the role that Hirshfield’s practice of Zen meditation has had in shaping her awareness of the world and as a direct result of that, her poetry. The three poems above are from The Asking: New and Selected Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2023.
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