Blog
In which the poets voice their individual opinions.
“Surprise You Inside Your Ears”
December 30, 2012
by David Groff
I keep coming back to Come, Thief, Jane Hirshfield’s 2011 volume. My husband Clay and I used a poem from it, “A Blessing for Wedding,” at our marriage ceremony last year. I’m sure the poem is going to become to be recited at a lot of nuptials in the years ahead. Unlike most epithalamions, and most blessings, it stays blessedly off the subject, admitting nature, birth, death, in a litany of “todays”:
Today when the fire keeps its promise to warm
Today when someone you love has died
or someone you never met has died
Today when someone you love has been born
or someone you will not meet has been born
Within this larger world the marrying couple is contextualized:
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Occasional poems are awfully hard to write. So often they strain to please their readers or the participants in their occasions, striking the bell too hard with their clapper and flattening out. But this poem can “surprise you inside your ears,” as do Hirshfield’s other poems. She writes from a place of Buddhist understanding (she has been lay-ordained in the Soto Zen tradition since 1979) but unlike certain other poets possessed of a system for spiritual apprehension, her poems constantly, gently, surprise. For the reader her connections can be subversively breathtaking, like being slapped on the side of your head while sitting on your meditation cushion.
I always feel my poems must start with conflict—“emotion recollected in anxiety,” as Galway Kinnell put it—but Hirshfield begins with a measured curiosity (a natural perception, or a musing to be expanded upon) and ends with discovery. Her stance of near-serene inquiry allows for perceptions that spin out like a bird with its own logic and startlement.
In “Sweater,” the garment that “takes on the shape of its wearer” and a spilled cup of coffee converge into a promise of renewal, and patience:
Patient the table; unjudging, the ample, refillable cup.
Irrefusable, the shape the sweater is given,
stretched in the shoulders, sleeves lengthened by unmetaphysical pullings on.
Thank goodness for the shock of that “unmetaphysical,” stitched right into the middle of the poem’s last line. Like Hirshfield’s poem, it brings us back to the blessing of the thing itself.
(Photo of Jane Hirshfield by Robert Hatch)
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