Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield (New York: HarperCollins, 2001)

In a recent poem, Jane Hirshfield rifts on the expiration date on a plastic container, and gets personal about the metaphor of perishability: “I found myself looking:/ now at the back of each hand,/ now inside the knees, / now turning over each foot to look at the sole.”

Her poems often begin with the easily overlooked stuff of everyday life. Like buttons (“The exhilaration of the washing is its wild pleasure.”) and walnuts (its “almost welded-in sweetness”).

But like a familiar melody that jazz musicians take apart and put together again, the everyday routine we think that we know by heart is transformed by Hirshfield into a soulful rhythm.

Turn off your iPod. This music is live.

An unfair advantage that children have over adults is their natural ability to perceive the magical realm of reality. The popularity of books like Harry Potter cannot be reduced to a single element; but the desire to confirm one’s suspicion about the extraordinary lurking below the surface of the ordinary must be given its due.

Hirshfield gently leads adults back to their younger imaginative days when a rock could be as interesting as the Cathedral of Notre Dame (“The work of a rock is to ponder whatever it is:/ an act that looks singly like prayer,/ but is not prayer.”).

Each day we live is filled with a thousand decisions about the way we perceive our surroundings. We get into the habit of seeing what we expect to see. Nothing changes. Especially us. Seeing the unexpected is a transformational experience. Hirshfield’s poems are a reminder that we can change if we open our eyes to the extraordinariness of our surroundings.

What happens if we read poetry like Hirshfield reads life?

We become lovers of words, of moments, of the sensuality of presence. We become what love turns us toward. Like a tree turning toward the sun — “the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,/ it turns in another.”

How many invisible habits have we accumulated over the years? I wonder if blind conformity and the practice of indifference in a world being torn apart by violence and suffering are less toxic than the daily habits that prevent us from seeing the beauty of small things. Not much is at stake. Just ourselves. Hirshfield warns: “But habit is different: it chooses./ And we, its good horse,/ opening our mouths at even the sight of the bit.”

Neigh.

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You can watch Jane Hirshfield read some of her poems at the following websites: