{"id":421,"date":"2012-12-30T20:35:06","date_gmt":"2012-12-30T20:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/?p=421"},"modified":"2012-12-30T23:10:01","modified_gmt":"2012-12-30T23:10:01","slug":"surprise-you-inside-your-ears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/surprise-you-inside-your-ears\/","title":{"rendered":"“Surprise You Inside Your Ears”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I keep coming back to Come, Thief<\/em>, Jane Hirshfield\u2019s 2011 volume. My husband Clay and I used a poem from it, \u201cA Blessing for Wedding,\u201d at our marriage ceremony last year. I\u2019m 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 \u201ctodays\u201d:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Today when the fire keeps its promise to warm<\/em>
\n Today when someone you love has died<\/em>
\n or someone you never met has died<\/em>
\n Today when someone you love has been born<\/em>
\n or someone you will not meet has been born<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Within this larger world the marrying couple is contextualized:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly<\/em>
\n Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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 \u201csurprise you inside your ears,\u201d as do Hirshfield\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I always feel my poems must start with conflict\u2014\u201cemotion recollected in anxiety,\u201d as Galway Kinnell put it\u2014but 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cSweater,\u201d the garment that \u201ctakes on the shape of its wearer\u201d and a spilled cup of coffee converge into a promise of renewal, and patience:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Patient the table; unjudging, the ample, refillable cup.<\/em>
\n Irrefusable, the shape the sweater is given,<\/em>
\n stretched in the shoulders, sleeves lengthened by unmetaphysical pullings on.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thank goodness for the shock of that \u201cunmetaphysical,\u201d stitched right into the middle of the poem\u2019s last line. Like Hirshfield\u2019s poem, it brings us back to the blessing of the thing itself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(Photo of Jane Hirshfield by Robert Hatch)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n\t\t