For What Binds Us by Jane Hirshfield

For What Binds Us
by Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

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I was looking for the line specifically about scar tissue, which I have enormous respect for, the ones on the outside and the ones on the inside, and how we’re all woven through with these interactions, especially when one gets to later life. I know I have black cords that I am indeed proud of, and I feel the poignancy of the fabric (the interbeingness) that “nothing can tear or mend”. This is early Hirshfield, from her second book Of Gravity and Angels (1988).