The Bowl by Jane Hirshfield

I listened to Krista Tippett interview Jane Hirshfield on “On Being.” They both read some of Hirshfield’s poems. I liked them all but this one (below) struck a chord with me. The line “A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl.”—what a good description. She uses the passive voice in most of the lines. The bowl/the day passively receives and is filled by whatever comes. True for us, too, right? We have no control and must receive what life (or God?) fills our days with. But there’s another poet, Mary Oliver, who writes, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do | with your one wild and precious life?” (“The Summer Day”) which implies we are not completely passive—we can decide what to do with what comes into our bowl.

At first, the poem made me a little melancholy. Here we are, going from one day to the next, our days filled over and over again and we have no control. It felt like a picture of us as hapless Dodge Ball victims getting hit all day long by whatever comes flying at us. Then Hirshfield talked about the last lines with the list of spices, “Scented—as the curve of the bowl is— | with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.” When I listened to the poem, I thought that ending seemed off-kilter, not a good fit. But she said:

But that then becomes, far beyond that, my sense of, I have been given this life. I have been given this existence, these years on this Earth, to accept what has come into my lifetime: wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness. I must take them. I must find a way to live in this world. You can’t refuse it. And along with the difficult is the radiant, the beautiful, the scent of the herbs, the “cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop” that cover all of the spices of the globe, and our hands, our 54 bones, our 10 fingers, the intimacy with which each one of us enters the life of all of us and takes what comes to our own door and figures out, what is our conversation? What is my responsibility? What must be suffered? What can be changed? What can I know? How can I meet this in a way which both lets me open my eyes the next day and also, perhaps, if I’m lucky, can be of service to a changed future?

Those spices represent “all of the spices of the globe.” “Along with the difficult is the radiant, the beautiful, the scent of the herbs…” And the lines about our hands, our fingers, our bones, represent “the intimacy with which each one of us enters the life of all of us…” We are passively receiving whatever fills our bowls, but that includes radiance and beauty. We are intimately a part of what life throws at us, yes, and, I believe, God’s hands are wrapped around our hands wrapped around our bowls.

The Bowl

Jane Hirshfield- 1953-

If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.

If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.

If a shoe is put into the bowl,
the leather is chewed and chewed over,
a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten.

A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl.
Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness,
it eats them.

Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry.

The bowl cannot be thrown away.
It cannot be broken.

It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless,
and, big though it seems, fits exactly in two human hands.

Hands with ten fingers,
fifty-four bones,
capacities strange to us almost past measure.
Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—
with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.

—2014

from Ledger (Knopf, 2020); first appeared in Brick.