Ledger Quotes

“My Hunger

The way the high-wire walker
must carry a pole
to make her arms longer

you carried me I carried you
through this world.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“Like Others

In the end,
I was like others.
A person.

Sometimes embarrassed,
sometimes afraid.

When “Fire!” was shouted,
some ran toward it,
some away—

I neck-deep among them.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“A person falling does not, mid-plummet,
look up.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“Every pocket I put you in had its hole.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“How close to human
must the breathed-in air come
before it develops a sense of shame or humor?”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“from "Nine Pebbles"
Library Book with Many Precisely Turned-Down Corners

I unfold carefully the thoughts of one who has come before me,
the way a listening dog's ears
may be seen lifting
to some sound beyond its person's quite understanding”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“Vest"
I put on again the vest of many pockets.
It is easy to forget
which holds the reading glasses,
which the small pen,
which the house keys,
the compass and whistle, the passport.
To forget at last for weeks
even the pocket holding the day
of digging a place for my sister's ashes,
the one holding the day
where someone will soon enough put my own.
To misplace the pocket
of touching the walls at Auschwitz
would seem impossible.
It is not.
To misplace, for a decade,
the pocket of tears.
I rummage and rummage—
transfers
for Munich, for Melbourne,
to Oslo.
A receipt for a Singapore kopi.
A device holding music:
Bach, Garcia, Richter, Porter, Pärt.
A woman long dead now
gave me, when I told her I could not sing,
a kazoo.
Now in a pocket.
Somewhere, a pocket
holding a Steinway.
Somewhere, a pocket
holding a packet of salt.
Borgesian vest,
Oxford English Dictionary vest
with a magnifying glass
tucked inside one snapped-closed pocket,
Wikipedia vest, Rosetta vest,
Enigma vest of decoding,
how is it one person can carry
your weight for a lifetime,
one person
slip into your open arms for a lifetime?
Who was given the world,
and hunted for tissues, for ChapStick.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“The arborist has determined:
senescence beetles canker
quickened by drought
but in any case
not prunable not treatable not to be propped.

And so.

The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.

The trunk where the ant.

The red squirrels’ eighty-foot playground.

The bark cambium pine-sap cluster of needles.

The Japanese patterns the ink-net.

The dapple on certain fish.

Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.

The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.

Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.

Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,

this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger

“Amor Fati

Little soul,
you have wandered
lost a long time.

The woods all dark now,
birded and eyed.

Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open.

The fairy tales warn you:
Do not go in,
you who would eat will be eaten.

You go in. You quicken.

You want to have feet.
You want to have eyes.
You want to have fears.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“Whatever handcuffs the soul,
I have brought here.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“Almost I took you as husband, love. Then
you left me.

I took surprise for husband instead.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“In a human-sized room,
someone is setting a human-sized table,
with yellow napkins,
someone is calling
her children to come in from a day whose
losses as yet remain child-sized.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems