I Remind Myself
.
I remind myself, ‘Do not mistake who you are.’
A petty tyrant,
like any other human-born being.
Deciding which shirt, which shoes.
Which ant will live – a matter of numbers, and where.
‘You beauty,’ I offered each morning,
……………whatever greeted my eyes.
Finding it better to do this before raising my head.
Also, before walking out to the street for the morning paper,
each few steps pausing to pull
…………….from the driveway’s rained-upon gravel
some weed whose long roots showed that it, too, wanted to live.
A desire for order and one’s own sense of it.
…………..This here. That there. I prefer.
……………………………..I washed my face
without thanking the water, without thanking the pipes
…………or those whose jackhammers laid them.
I found pleasure in bringing a soup to just the right heat.
I felt my life mine, and separate.
As if it were mine and separate, I washed my body with clean-scented soap.
Evolution must surely have stumbled into creating,
…………..however poorly, this koan
of porcelain bath tubs and self-deception, of faces with front-facing eyes.
I look about me. I blink.
Everywhere beings who worry, who notice birthdays, who war.
…………..And still, existence’s single dice-throw –
the wish to go on, over not.
Which may yet tip its human experiments,
………..I choose to believe, a little toward beauty, humility, kindness;
toward the small, persistence resistances
self raises, at least sometimes, against its own hand:
…………..perplexity, embarrassment, apology; falling in love.
.
.
Jane Hirshfield’s ten poetry collections include most recently The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2024), a Poetry Book Society recommendation. The author also of three now classic collections of essays on poetry’s infrastructure and craft and four books presenting world poets from the deep past, Hirshfield’s honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Center Book Award and the California Book Award. Among American poetry’s foremost spokespersons for the biosphere, in 2017 she founded Poets For Science, an interactive cross-disciplinary installation that has appeared across the US at universities, museums, research centres, as well as the National Academy of Sciences. The 2022 Seamus Heaney Visiting Poet at Queen’s University, Belfast; a 2026 Visiting Fellow at Harvard Divinity School; and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
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