After Jane Hirshfield's Spell to be Said Against Hatred

 

After Jane Hirshfield's Spell to be Said Against Hatred

Until the Dramatis Personae of the book's first pages says 'Each one is you.'

              Jane Hirshfield

              Spells Against Hatred

what vessel would you be if you had to be

a vessel that would carry each and

all the stories living and dead beneath

the bone and sinew of your body your neighbor's

body the bone and sinew of strangers on paved

or unpaved roads rural or super highways or bullet

trains and their special tracks like the ones

in Japan that can and can't slow down 

paradoxically in a vessel that takes them to

wherever their wherever is in a hurry such

as the California condor could never

comprehend?  Would you be an animate

or inanimate vessel and then ambulatory or station

-ary until someone if they could if they wanted to

moved you which is to say are you the train

or are you her passengers or even are you her 

just the right recipe of carbon and steel rods

and rails and roads?  And of passengers are you

standing or sitting are your limbs loose or

keyed are your eyes and navel shut or or 

halfway closed lazy or startled wide with surprise

or shock or deja vu wary?  Or maybe you

would be the story of your choice in a stained

glass window in a cathedral or chapel again

your choice and you would be the colors

and you would be the lights (sun and altar

or stations of the cross candle) and too the leaded

solids between each broken mosaic's tesserae

and then be the eyes taking it all in and suddenly

blink and sting and turn off the voices reading

in your head and settle instead on the two

cruets of olive oil and wine respectively and watch

the slow air bubbles rise but not rise in 

the acidic green and be too that chrism pressed

between their own olive wood Gethsemanes,

squeezed and squeezed into sweet agony of flesh 

of pits of kisses of inexhaustible after inexhaustible

drop falling and caught on the thumb and rubbed 

into the finger and lifted to hover while 

the proper prayer is conjured and said above

the head of the almost blessed the almost (but O!

the tired limbs of the godmother) redeemed, 

the almost free?