Not One Moment of This a Subtraction

By Jane Hirshfield

all day the daylight coming over the sill
like a wagon
drawn by invisible big-hooved horses working hard

soon now your breathing will climb inside it, go with it away

all your mountains and rivers
your cities and memories
doing their silent handsprings inside it

—Jane Hirshfield

 

Jane Hirshfield has been a poet in residence for an experimental forest in Oregon and a neuroscience research program at UCSF. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and her TED-Ed animated lesson on metaphor has received over 1.3 million views. Her nine published poetry books (most recently Ledger), two books of essays, and four books collecting and co-translating world poets from the deep past have received the Poetry Center Book Award, California Book Award, Columbia University’s National Translation Award, and been finalists or longlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and England’s T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Founder of the traveling and online installation Poets for Science, a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a member of Orion’s advisory board, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. The Asking: New and Selected Poems comes out this September.