A person
dreams herself blind
hearing the click of a light switch.
*
Forty years since the wake-up han’s
much battered ink-written
“Don’t waste time.”
*
Night-weather’s hearable.
Sometimes the mallet-sound sharp,
other times muffled.
*
Self, too, was hearable inside and outside
the
skin
inside and outside the scent of creek and pine.
*
Stars, wind, day, night, pine bark.
They don’t need us.
They don’t need to be stars, wind, day, night, pine bark.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight poetry books, including The Beauty and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She has been honored with the Poetry Center Book Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets.
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.
