Poet's Nook: "Against Certainty" by Jane Hirshfield

 

There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.

Each time I think “this,” it answers “that.”

Answers hard, in the heart-grammar’s strictness.

 

If I then say “that,” it too is taken away.

 

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

When the cat waits in the path-hedge,

no cell of her body is not waiting,

this is how she is able so completely to disappear.

 

I would like to enter the silence portion as she does.

 

To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live,

one shadow fully at ease inside another.