deeper things- the lovely sounds they make in the wind

Three posts in a day! I think I have this sense of urgency that I will not be able to keep this writing up as I get more under this treatment. But here is the verse from a poem I read before bed (I don't have the energy to read books it seems, so poems are about the right length. Jane Hirshfield is quite a poet; I accidently "discovered" her when I recently bought a book of her poems used for a buck. I know nothing formally about poetry, and nothing about poets, for that matter...just what grabs me...and selfishly, those are the poems I put here. These poems speak to me. These verses had me thinking at 5 AM.


The art is what is extra:
a fragrance penciled in,
or long division's inescapable remainder.
Not quite unplanned for,
more the unexpected, impractical gift.
Not the figures traced
in the bridge's stanchions,
but the small
and lovely sounds they make in the wind.
Who drew that in?
Who could have?

So I was thinking...sunsets and sunrises are facts of earth's rotation and it's orbit around the sun...elegant usefulness...but the colors!...the sound of a single squirrel running across our shake shingle roof is like a stampede of horses...the lonely clanging sound of a naked flagpole, it's rope and metal clasp clanging in the wind; the even lonelier sound of a train in the distance at 3AM... who drew these in....the hundreds, thousands of "extras" ...the art!



Orange Oil in Darkness
Jane Hirschfield

The useful part
of things is elegance -
in mathematics, bridges.

Even in hedges
of ripe persimmons
or mandarin oranges,

elegance solves
for the minimum possible,
then dissolves.

The art is what is extra:
a fragrance penciled in,
or long division's inescapable remainder.

Not quite unplanned for,
more the unexpected, impractical gift.
Not the figures traced

in the bridge's stanchions,
but the small
and lovely sounds they make in the wind.

Who drew that in?
Who could have?
For years now I've mistaken

art for beauty,
but it is not beauty.
Art lives in a plenitude more iron,

more empty, less demanding.
Art doesn't care,
except in moments of despair.

Those it lets pass, recognizing weakness.