Of Gravity and Angels Quotes

“To Hear the Falling World

Only if I move my arm a certain way,
it comes back.
Or the way the light bends in the trees
this time of year,
so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart.
I carry this in my body, seed
in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe.
But they guard me, these small pains,
from growing sure
of myself and perhaps forgetting.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity and Angels

“And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

from “For What Binds Us”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity and Angels

“While in the water bird’s throat, the white, visible pulse of a fish. Between being and becoming, turning wildly as it falls.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels

“TO DRINK I want to gather your darkness in my hands, to cup it like water and drink. I want this in the same way as I want to touch your cheek— it is the same— the way a moth will come to the bedroom window in late September, beating and beating its wings against cold glass; the way a horse will lower his long head to water, and drink, and pause to lift his head and look, and drink again, taking everything in with the water, everything. IN YOUR HANDS I begin to grow extravagant, like kudzu, that rank, green weed devouring house after house in the South— towards midday, the roof tiles start to throw a wavering light back towards the sun, and roads begin to soften, darken, taking your peregrine tongue, your legs, your eyes, home to shuttered windows, to the cool rooms”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels

“I wake to a simple longing,
all I want of this ordinary hour,
this ordinary earth
that was long ago married to time:
to hear as a sand crab hears the waves,
loud as a second heart;
to see as a green thing sees the sun,
with the undividing attention of blind love.

— Jane Hirshfield, from “Rain in May,” Of Gravity & Angels. (Wesleyan; 1 edition February 15, 1988)”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity and Angels

“But mostly we are made of a heavier stuff, the slow descent of breast, foot-arches flattening towards earth, the hundred ways the body longs for home.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels

“have little to offer in this time when nothing lasts, only that desire to which you come as to a well. Even the language tells it: to satisfy and sadness rooted on one stock, the faithful breathing back towards shadow of everything that once bent to the sun. And still, the long slanting days pull us in, the warmth, the pitch of the hills, and everything in us wants to give over again— Only a little further, a hand’s extending, a single word; the mirage, beautiful, beckons us on.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels

“TOWARD THE SOLSTICE 9 A.M., already the day is gathering into heat, and the hills today are a little less green than they were, like the flowers closing now into one concentrated whorl, their color pulled to a tightening heart. I woke this morning thinking of your lips, how they lie flat, almost smiling when you sleep, and of your hair that feels much like a child’s; in a room somewhere east of here you may have turned within that thought, caught in the cool scent of bleach and hotels, the white hum of summer night rising towards day.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels

“SLEEPING Here, we are one geography: every part of us inked on a map where, across all the blue waters, continents’ edges inexplicably match. I move closer to you in the dark, feel the slow heat that embers you deeper into the night. Where all fires descend a few hours into their own slow-dreaming hearts. Where the ravine hides in its own steepness no matter how long, how fiercely we love.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels

“THIS RIPENESS Thin roads splice field to field in the early light; under the trees, many pears lie opening to the ground. This ripeness is the landscape I want, a hand on the kitchen table passing from sunlight to shadow, warm wood to cool, and back, behind me the bright jars ranked on their shelves—harvest of rutted lanes, too small for naming, that lead, one to another, through the day.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels

“TROMPE L’OEIL What you understand no longer matters: the rain beats its steady solo on the roof and you can hear the saints assenting, “Get that jazz!” while the old dropped drumsticks clatter on, unowned. Or else the sky is empty, blue on blue, ascending towards an unremitting cold—trompe l’oeil, all this azure the atmosphere’s trick. You think you can hold on to it, but erosion cups the garden into being. Look at the alley there, between the buildings: how the motes dance down, slip between gravity and air. See how the sliding days silt in with seeing, drown.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels

“he is like a soldier or a saint: blank-faced, and given wholly to an obedience he does not need to understand.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels