Four by Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt

Moment

A person wakes from sleep
and does not know for a time
who she is, who he is.

this happens in a lifetime
once or twice.
It has happened to you, no doubt.

Some in that moment
panic,
some sigh with pleasure.

How each kind later envies the other,
who must so love their lives.


Button

It likes both to enter and to leave,
actions it seems to feel as a sort of hide-and-seek.
It knows nothing of what the cloth believes
of its magus-like powers.

If fastening and unfastening are its nature,
it doesn't care about its nature.

It likes the caress of two fingers
against its slightly thickened edges.
It likes the scent and heat of the proximate body.
The exhilaration of the washing is its wild pleasure.

Amoralist, sensualist, dependent of cotton thread,
its sleep is curled like a cat to a patch of sun,
calico and round.

Its understanding is the understanding
of honey and jasmine, of letting what happens come.

A button envies no neighboring button,
no snap, no knot, no polyester-braided toggle.
It rests on its red-checked shirt in serene disregard.

it is its own story, completed.

Brevity and longevity mean nothing to a button carved of horn.

Nor do old dreams of passion disturb it,
Though once it wandered the ten thousand grasses
with the musk-fragrance caught in its nostrils;
though once it followed—it did, I tell you—that wind for miles.


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 blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence rose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.


Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.