Today, Another Universe

Jane Hirshfield

8.8.15

The arborist has determined:

senescence         beetles        canker

quickened by drought 

                                     but in any case 

not prunable      not treatable      not to be propped.

And so.

The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate cries.

The trunk where the ant.

The red squirrels’ eighty-foot playground.

The bark   cambium    pine-sap     cluster of needles.   

The Japanese patterns        the ink-net.

The dapple on certain fish. 

Today, for some, a universe will vanish. 

First noisily, 

then just another silence.

The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.

Of bewilderment after the glacier, 

the species, the star.

Something else, in the scale of quickening things, 

will replace it, 

this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.

JANE HIRSHFIELD is one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Read More

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“Today, Another Universe” was previously published in Ledger (NY: Knopf / Newcastle UK: Bloodaxe, 2020). This poem has been reprinted by permission of the author.