a writing blog.

by Jane Hirshfield

It was like this: you were happy, then you were sad, then happy again, then not.

It went on. You were innocent or you were guilty. Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent. Mostly, it seems you were silent — what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness — between you, there is nothing to forgive — but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

by Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself