My life,
you were a door
I was given to walk through
WHEN YOU OPEN Jane Hirshfield’s recently released book The Asking: New and Selected Poems, those are the first lines you encounter. And when I walked through Hirshfield’s door on a recent visit, I was struck by the way that her house seems both to celebrate the richness of the inner life and to open itself to the world beyond. The house is a hundred-year-old cottage, perched high on a hill in a small town north of San Francisco. With its glass jars full of spices and teas, its shelves full of books, its worn, patterned rugs, bentwood armchairs, and bright-blue window seat, it feels cozy and fully inhabited. Yet through its large, multipaned windows, the outside—a garden teeming with flowers, vegetable beds, and fruit trees—seems flamboyantly present. And from the back of the house, you can see Mount Tamalpais rising in the near distance.
Although Hirshfield and I first met decades ago, we hadn’t seen each other in years, and even as I was absorbing the atmosphere of her home, I could feel that we were both adjusting to the mixture of sameness and difference we found in each other’s faces. Her eyes were as intensely blue-green as I remembered them, her hair still a long, rippling stream—and she did not look anything like the haggard crone Ono no Komachi, the ninth-century Japanese woman whose praises she sang in her first prose book, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.
Komachi was legendary for the power of her poetry, the depth of her spiritual insight, and her great physical beauty. But as a very old woman, frail and half-mad, she wandered along narrow mountain trails. As Hirshfield wrote, “It is this figure—the
