OPTIMISM: poet Jane Hirshfield on true resilience

I read this poem by the gifted American contemporary poet Jane Hirshfield for the first time just recently, and it really spoke to me. I especially love the qualifier,  "Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam/ returns over and over to the same shape..." How aptly that describes the unthinking, unchanging optimism many of us have early in life...and how lyrically the remainder of the work evokes the deeper resilience that comes with time, experience, and pain.

Optimism
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Most definitely, a poet worth reading.

"Optimism" is by Jane Hirshfield and appears in Given Sugar, Given Salt, © Harper Collins, 2002.This link to the archives of Poetry magazine gives you a brief biography of the poet and several of her other beautifully written poems; this one brings you to the agency that books her for speaking and readers, which offers a longer biography.

FINAL WORDS: a Japanese tradition

The Japanese, who have traditionally looked at death very differently than we do here in the West, have a very old poetic form called jisei: the death poem. Usually written right on the verge of dying, jisei are in some sense a farewell to life and consciousness: the spiritual counterparts of the making of a last will, an important tradition in Japanese culture. Samurai wrote jisei, as did lovers who committed double suicide and people in a variety of other fields. But many of the surviving jisei we have today were written by Japanese monks, and their names, ages, and dates of death are recorded along with their poems. In the process the poems become the monks' legacies, lasting long after their lives, always quietly lived, have ended and passed into history.


The practice of writing a poem right during the act of dying sounds morbid, doesn't it, and also pretty strange? I can't imagine anyone here in the West consciously trying to time their death simultaneously with a poem, though perhaps we should try it. One jisei story tells of a man so preoccupied with making sure that his death poem was appropriate that he began writing examples when he was fifty, a full thirty years or more before he actually died. Maybe the challenge inherent in the project gave him what we would call a longer lease on life.

There is something moving about many jisei pieces, which are mostly in the haiku or tanka form. Some are haunting: A journey of no return:/ the wanderer's sack is/bottomless, wrote a monk named Kyoshu just before his death in 1769. The surface/ of the water mirrors/ many things, another monk wrote in 1825; still another, Boarding the boat/ I slip off my shoes:/moon in the water. Even in the awkwardness of translation, which can never hope to capture either the rhythm of the originals or their complexity of their imagery, they are hauntingly lovely.

But some jisei are wry and earthy. My only hope against/ the cold/one hot-water bottle, wrote Meisetsu; monk Raishi writes, You've done your duty/ till today,/ old scarecrow. A brother named Shiyo, who died at only 32, was downright sardonic--forgiveable, perhaps, in such a young man: Surely there's a teahouse/ with a view of plum trees/ on Death Mountain, too. Utsu, who died in cherry-blossom season, used it for inspiration. The owner of the cherry blossoms/ turns to compost/ for the trees, he wrote.

Whether they are sad or sardonic, jisei always seem to accept—or even embrace—death as a natural part of life rather than just an abrupt or unfair ending to it. That's a hard place for most of us to reach, but jisei let us spend a small, resonant moment there.

The poems quoted above, and many more, can be found in Yoel Hoffmann's lovely collection Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death.

RUMBLINGS OF DEPARTURE

I loved this small poem by the American poet Louise Glück. Called Departure. it shows us the briefest glimpse of a complex story without explaining what that story is. Yet the emotions, though evoked with indirection and subtlety, are clear. The combination of said and unsaid, present and absent, is often what gives poetry its resonance, and so it is here.


Departure
Louise Glück
My father is standing on a railway platform.
Tears pool in his eyes, as though the face
glimmering in the window were the face of someone
he was once. But the other has forgotten;
as my father watches, he turns away,
drawing the shade over his face,
goes back to his reading.


And already in its deep groove
the train is waiting with its breath of ashes.

The poem is reprinted from the poet's book The House on Marshland, originally published by the Ecco Press in 1975. (The always interesting Ecco is now an imprint of HarperCollins.) The book is now, sadly, out of print, though copies can likely be found at your library or bought on used-book sites like http://www.alibris.com/.