Metempsychosis

Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off—the immeasurable’s continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots. Slowly, with effort,
they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking,
unimaginably further.

~ Jane Hirshfield ~

(Given Sugar, Given Salt)

Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Metempsychosis.html

Jane Hirshfield (born 1953) is an award-winning American poet.

She was born in New York City and received her bachelor's degree from Princeton University in the school's first graduating class to include women. She later studied at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Hirshfield has worked as a freelance writer and translator. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and as the Elliston Visiting Poet at the University of Cincinnati. She is currently on the faculty of the Bennington Master of Fine Arts Writing Seminars.

Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.


Books by Jane Hirshfield
Of Gravity & Angels - 1988 - 84 pages
Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems - 2004 - 128 pages
Quarterly Review of Literature - 1982
books.google.com -

Poetry Foundation: The online home of the Poetry Foundation
For Jane Hirshfield, every action is a form of judgment. ... Poet Jane Hirshfield endured a small one in 1987,
in a way too seemingly commonplace to inspire ...
www.poetryfoundation.org/features/feature.onpoets.html?id=178400 -

Ploughshares, the literary journal
She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the NEA, ...
www.pshares.org/Authors/authorDetails.cfm?prmAuthorID=700 -