metempsychosis

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Some stories last many centuries,

others only a moment.

All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,

grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

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Yet even today, to look at a tree

and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

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There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

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Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,

ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

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Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket

gives off --

the immeasurable's continuous singing,

before it goes back into story and feeling.

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In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.

Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

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I would like to join that stilted transmigration,

to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:

an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

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I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.

To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,

and then keep walking, unimaginably further.

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~ Jane Hirshfield

from Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems


photo of the Socratea exorrhiza or walking palm
which can move itself up to about a meter per year

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