First Light Edging Cirrus

                                     1025 molecules
                                     are enough
                                     to call woodthrush or apple.

                                    A hummingbird, fewer.
                                    A wristwatch: 1024.

                                    An alphabet's molecules,
                                    tasting of honey, iron, and salt,
                                    cannot be counted—

                                     as some strings, untouched,
                                     sound when a near one is speaking.

                                     As it was when love slipped inside us.
                                     It looked out face to face in every direction.

                                     Then it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud.

 
                                                                         Jane Hirshfield


Here are some quotes I really  liked from Kim Rosen's  interview with  Jane Hirshfield on The Mystery of Existence
 
                               
 " You have been a Zen practitioner for many years. How have your own spiritual path and your evolution as a poet been interwoven? Does your Zen practice teach you about writing poetry? Does your writing teach you about Zen?
They are left foot and right foot.
Zen is the taste of your own tongue in your own mouth. It’s a way to find something very simple that’s already present within you—a subtler, sharper, nondistanced, and nondistancing awareness. Everything else emerges from this intimacy with your own life, this opening into attention. We become the instruments of our lives and become part of the orchestra of the larger existences that our lives in turn are part of.
The same basic attention and permeability are the beginning of poetry writing. Whatever I’ve done in both practice and poetry is a search for ways of seeing and speaking, of feeling and understanding, that draw from the limitless well of the limitless real. I’ll add, I always feel a slight dismay if I’m called a “Zen” poet. I am not. I am a human poet, that’s all. Labels just get in the way. The fundamental wildness and mystery of existence slip every leash we try to put on them, and both meditation practice and the writing of poems are leash-slipping acts.


What do you hope your poems offer your readers and the world?

A door. One that stands outside our usual addresses and maps—or more truly, perhaps, many doors at once, that lead simultaneously outward and inward, into both the life we share with others and the privacy in which self can take stock with original eyes. I hope my poems might offer: “Here is one experience of life, of its possibilities, exhilarations, bewilderments, griefs. Enter. Now, here is another.” When we bring that spirit of openness, permeability, exploration, and courage into our lives and our hands, everything else follows: a deeper saturation and compassion, a recalibrating sense of proportion, an increase of the possible. Good poems make clarity without making simple. They do not erase darkness; if anything, they open into it. But wouldn’t the page of a day be dull and undistinguished, almost as if unsigned by existence, without its charcoal?

 You can hear Jane Hirshfield's beautiful  reading of  her poem  For What Binds Us on this link.
For What Binds Us