PoetryMagazine.com Jane Hirshfield

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Since 1996 Volume XXI

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield’s eighth book of poetry, The Beauty, will appear from Knopf in March 2015, along with a book of essays, Ten Windows. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield’s work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and seven editions of The Best American Poems.

I Wake Early

I wake early,

make two cups of coffee,

drink one,

think, go back to sleep,

wake again, think,

drink the other.

To start a day over

is a card game played for no money,

a ripe tomato,

a swimming cat.

Time here:

lukewarm,

with milk and sugar,

big and unset as a table.

I wake twice.

Twice the window

unbroken, transparent.

Twice the cat’s nose and ears above water.

Twice the war (my war)

is distant,

its children’s children are distant.

appeared first in The American Poetry Review and will be in
Jane Hirshfield’s eighth book of poetry, The Beauty