Jane Hirshfield
My life,
you were a door I was given
to walk through.
Dawdling
in lintel and loosestrife as much as permitted.
Your own glass knob,
I spoke you:
A sentence, however often rewritten,
ending always with the same slightly rusty-hinged preposition,
sometimes, for mercy, hidden.
Jane Hirshfield, “Door and Sentence” from The Asking, Copyright © 2023. Reprinted with permission from the author.
Jane Hirshfield is one of the most celebrated, skilled poets in the world today. With a directness and sensitivity that seem unlikely to mix so well, her poems play in the intersections of the sciences, spirituality and literary traditions. Also an essayist with strong Zen Buddhist training, Hirshfield — with a somehow palatable frankness — turns toward the crisis of the Earth and what is it to be human.
Hirshfield has been one of the most — if not the most — influential poets in my life. In the image of the doorway in Door and Sentence, I feel invited to see the flatness of that threshold, to notice not just the brevity of our lives but also their significance as passageways. Our lives are not necessarily the homes we may experience them as, when we are dawdling within their structures or aesthetics; rather, they are by definition liminal spaces. I feel invited to sense my life as a transitional space of opportunity versus as a destination or as something that belongs to me. With this sensing comes wakefulness, intentionality and the power to make revisions. I also feel invited to linger in the particular doorway that is my life. To truly experience it.
