A person protests to fate:
“The things you have caused
me most to want
are those that furthest elude me.”
Fate nods.
Fate is sympathetic.
To tie the shoes, button a shirt,
are triumphs
for only the very young,
the very old.
During the long middle:
conjugating a rivet
mastering tango
training the cat to stay off the table
preserving a single moment longer than this one
continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before
and the penmanships love practices inside the body.
 
Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. Used with permission of the author. |
|
About This Poem
“Much that once seemed impossibly difficult is later taken for granted; then, in age, it becomes again hard. For most of a life, the fingers only feel unmanageable if, say, at forty or fifty you decide to learn guitar or piano.
The unreachable is the magnet of desire. We long to long. Some things, though, are outside all this. No matter our own will or wish, they reach for us—a great love; the unwriteable poem; all that becomes our own soon-enough-to-be-finished fates.”
—Jane Hirshfield
|
|
|
Jane Hirshfield is the author of two new books, The Beauty (Knopf, 2015) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015). She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in San Francisco’s Bay Area.
Photo Credit: Michael Lionheart
|
|
|
Most Recent Book by Hirshfield
|
|
|
"If There Is Something to Desire, 9, 17, 18" by Vera Pavlova
 |
"Driven by a Strange Desire" by Mónica de la Torre
|
"Manifest Destiny" by Cynthia Lowen
|
|
|
Poem-a-Day
Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.
|
|
|
|
|
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기