As a general rule, my muse resists requests. Yet when Graham Plumb, a sculptor working at the intersection of art, science, and technology, emailed for permission to use an earlier poem in the project described in this one’s title, he added, “And if you’d like to write something new also, especially for this…” Months later, I found myself writing to that implausible invitation. The exhibit, meanwhile, seems to have fallen—as did so much and so many—to the pandemic. Plumb assures me the pieces will still at some point go on public display, and I couldn’t see stripping the poem of its title and raison d’être just because that, too, had stepped into the saddle of transience and gone away.
This poem appears in Issue 24 of Alta Journal.
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Today, I think I’ll join an exiled Italian poet,
perhaps Ovid or Horace,
training a handful of grapevines on a steep-sided farm.
You don’t need a not-yet-invented machine to do that.
Words make time’s saddle.
The horse’s back rises and falls, going away.
Or I’ll join the vines. I’ll drink the sun straight,
as the vines do.
Vines, unlike poets, don’t talk much,
or struggle with what they’re turning the sunlight into.
They turn their leaves toward it and grapes just arrive.
A human heart, sent into exile from all its wanting,
might ripen like that,
into some small-clustered kindness or a rescuing joke.
The way a magnet becomes itself wherever there’s iron.
Plunged into water, set into oil, it still pulls.
A magnet doesn’t have to go into exile to be a magnet.
Put a magnet down anywhere on this earth,
that magnet is home.•
Jane Hirshfield’s 10th poetry collection, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, will be published by Knopf in September 2023. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she lives on the hem of Mount Tamalpais in the San Francisco Bay Area.
