February 29 by Jane Hirshfield

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend February 29, 2016   February 29   Jane Hirshfield

An extra day—   Like the painting’s fifth cow, who looks out directly, straight toward you, from inside her black and white spots.   An extra day— Accidental, surely: the made calendar stumbling over the real as a drunk trips over a threshold too low to see.   An extra day—   With a second cup of black coffee. A friendly but businesslike phone call. A mailed-back package. Some extra work, but not too much— just one day’s worth, exactly.   An extra day—   Not unlike the space between a door and its frame when one room is lit and another is not, and one changes into the other as a woman exchanges a scarf.   An extra day—   Extraordinarily like any other. And still there is some generosity to it, like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.            Excerpted from The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. About This Poem   “Behind this poem, written February 29, 2012, was the death of a friend. I had, months before, brought her the present of a traditional bamboo-slat painted reproduction of a famous Chinese painting. She had commented, with her customary inhabitance of all things from the inside, how hard it is to paint a cow so well from the front. Her death was unexpected, and a letter from her I had not wanted to put away was still out on my kitchen table. My year’s extra day circled around it.” —Jane Hirshfield   Jane Hirshfield is the author of The Beauty (Knopf, 2015) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015). She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in San Francisco’s Bay Area.   Photo credit: Nick Rozsa  Poetry by Hirshfield   The Beauty (Knopf, 2015) "Thanks" by W. S. Merwin "Sediments of Santa Monica" by Brenda Hillman "The Night Migrations" by Louise Glück Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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