Perspective Without Any Point In Which It Might Vanish

The way the green or blue or yellow in a painting

is simply green and yellow and blue,
and tree is, boat is, sky is
in them also—

There are worlds
in which nothing is adjective, everything noun.

This among them.

Even today—this fallen day—
it might be so.
Footstep, footstep, footstep intimate on it.

∞

From the Spring 2015 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 32, No. 2)

Published by permission of the author.

Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, essayist, translator and frequent contributor to Inquiring Mind. Two new books appeared in March, 2015, from Knopf: The Beauty (poems) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (essays). A longtime practitioner of Soto Zen, she was lay ordained in 1979.