My Doubt by Jane Hirshfield

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend January 4, 2016   My Doubt   Jane Hirshfield

I wake, doubt, beside you, like a curtain half-open.   I dress doubting, like a cup  undecided if it has been dropped.   I eat doubting, work doubting, go out to a dubious cafe with skeptical friends.   I go to sleep doubting myself, as a herd of goats sleep in a suddenly gone-quiet truck.   I dream you, doubt, nightly— for what is the meaning of dreaming if not that all we are while inside it is transient, amorphous, in question?   Left hand and right hand, doubt, you are in me, throwing a basketball, guiding my knife and my fork. Left knee and right knee, we run for a bus, for a meeting that surely will end before we arrive.   I would like to grow content in you, doubt, as a double-hung window settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes.   I doubt I can do so: your own counterweight governs my nights and my days.   As the knob of hung lead holds steady the open mouth of a window, you hold me, my kneeling before you resistant, stubborn, offering these furious praises I can’t help but doubt you will ever be able to hear.            Copyright © 2016 by Jane Hirshfield. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “There are times almost impossible to navigate and silencing, when everything has come into question. The doubt behind this poem was, in the living of it, something close to despair—at my own life; at the life of the world held in any day’s news. Yet to find within the times of ash anything that might be made word-malleable, anything susceptible to imaginative leap and some sense, even, of the comic—that in itself is antidote and through-passage. By the time the poem was half-written, the window had been cracked open an inch; once that happens, some breathable air can’t help but rush in.” —Jane Hirshfield   Jane Hirshfield is the author of The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), which was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the 2016 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University.   Photo credit: Nick Rozsa Poetry by Hirshfield   The Beauty (Knopf, 2015) "Business" by Naomi Shihab Nye "Why They Went" by Elizabeth Bradfield "Recession" by Sydney Lea Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038