The Tongue Says Loneliness by Jane Hirshfield
The Tongue Says Loneliness
by Jane Hirshfield
The tongue says loneliness, anger, grief,
but does not feel them.
As Monday cannot feel Tuesday,
nor Thursday
reach back to Wednesday
as a mother reaches out for her found child.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Not a bell,
but the sound of the bell in the -bell--shape,
lashing full strength with the first blow from inside the iron.
I love the idea of this life being not the gate but the horse plunging, the sound of the bell in the bell shape, lashing — there’s such a fierceness and immediacy of it that I long for. And it was certainly relevant to the immediacy of grief that brought me to this poem, but what I think Jane Hirschfield writes so beautifully is the about the experiencing of life itself. We are not the form, or the category, or the shape of life, we are the interiority of it in a given moment, held by context certainly, but we ARE life, we ARE alive — you know, until we’re not. This is very resonant with Rilke’s “be the glass that shatters as it rings”.
Jane Hirshfield wrote this in her late forties, when Given Sugar, Given Salt was establishing her as one of the major American poets working at the intersection of contemplative practice and formal poetics. The contemplative nature of her work is what continually orients me to her writing.
