Liner Notes by Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield wrote these beautiful liner notes, I just had to post!

This poem’s lake and maple, its quicksand and egret, all still exist, or their descendents do, going through the same motions of eternity and subtraction, of surface breaking and quick disappearance, of one existence moving into another. It’s a bit like the child’s game of “scissors, paper, rock.” Maple drinks lake, lake becomes maple, leaves fall and feed fish, fish are eaten by egret, moonlight adds its weightlessness to them all, rain comes and leaves, then returns. Consuming and consumed, vanishing and returning, are what we are made of, and of all our loves and longings, as well. This poem signs on for longing – for the human grief of human longing, and for the enlarging longing that calls us into the lake a 14th c. Indian mystic once sang of, limitlessly large. Transparence restores beauty. Inclusion restores beauty. And when those consolations cannot be found or felt, there’s still the beak of the egret touching the water, and the water’s answering shiver. There’s still Lal Ded’s human-voiced singing, if not her lake.
Poems live in people, one by one, as powerful secrets do. They pass between us in silence and on the voice – yet even read in silence, they are meant to be heard. A written poem is a score that wants to awaken inside the instrument of a single human life—right now, yours. Poems are, for me, the deepest voice we hear, one whose overtones and undertones hold the music of full existence. It’s good to think that this poem and its 99 companions are traveling here between larynx, breath, and ear, each becoming an audible secret.

“Lake and Maple” comes from upstate New York, where I still go often, but I’ve lived for 35 years now in the San Francisco Bay Area, writing poems and essays, travelling to teach and give readings, talking with as many kinds of people as I can—biologists, animal psychologists, geomorphologists, physicists, carpenters, artists, farmers, practitioners of all the many forms of awareness. Every one of them, it seems to me, is trying as best they can to save this world.