EMBRACING THIS WORLD: HIRSCH'S EARTHLY LIGHT

EARTHLY LIGHT

4.

I remember the warm day in winter

when I stood on a hotel balcony listening

to bells ringing in the distance.

I had just seen all those galleries

of seventeenth-century light slipping

through interior courtyards and alleys,

branding doors and ceilings, pressing down

lightly on skulls of buildings.

I had just seen rhetorics of light flashing

on curtains and tablecloths, mirrors

and windows, old maps and well-preserved

canvases varnished and framed.

I was alone, and for a while I stared

into a sky washed clean by rain,

an atmosphere luminous and polished,

ready to ascend, transparent as wings.

I saw tugboats pulling heavy barges

up and down the ice-filled river

while a white disc flamed overhead

and hands of purple light that resembled

bruises drifted and gradually dispersed.

I thought of northern skies flooded

with blue and gray, of monochromatic clouds

and rain-soaked wind blowing across the plains.

I thought of a landscape flattened

like unbleached canvas and steeped

in vertiginous greens, of the artists

who could liquefy thickest sunlight,

and the tangible, earth-colored country

that was all there would be to paint.

That February day I looked directly

into a wintry, invisible world

and that was when I turned away

from the God or gods I had wanted

so long and so much to believe in.

That was when I hurried down the stairs

into a street already crowded with people.

Because this world, too, needs our unmixed

attention, because it is not heaven

but earth that needs us, because

it is only earth – limited, sensuous

earth that is so fleeting, so real.

~ Edward Hirsch, from Earthly Measures

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Note: "Unmixed attention" is Simone Weil's definition of prayer.

Hirsch seems attracted to religion (note that this section starts with church bells ringing in the distance), and it’s likely that he’s read (or tried to read) Simone Weil’s Waiting for God. But ultimately, like Jack Gilbert, he “refuses heaven.” 

That February day I looked directly

into a wintry, invisible world

and that was when I turned away

from the God or gods I had wanted

so long and so much to believe in.

He turns to fully accepting and celebrating the earth. Only Jack Gilbert goes further and says, "We have already lived in paradise." 

But my favorite lines in Hirsch's poem are these:

I had just seen all those galleries

of seventeenth-century light slipping

through interior courtyards and alleys,

branding doors and ceilings, pressing down

lightly on skulls of buildings.

-- that seventeenth-century light slipping through courtyards and alleys slips into me forever. "Skulls of buildings" is brilliant.  Edward Hirsch is one of our greatest living poets. I find him more interesting and versatile than W. S. Merwin or Jack Gilbert.  


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