Last week Paul Breslin shared with us some ideas about Zen Buddhism, and this week Robert Pinsky offers us a poem by poet and practitioner of Zen Buddhism, Jane Hirshfield.

On its surface, “Invitation” is simple enough – a woman gets an invitation to travel somewhere, and immediately she forgets her present surroundings and imagines traveling to “Krakow, Galway, Beijing…That small museum outside Philadelphia” [the Barnes Collection, and yes, it’s still open].

But giving in to the “perfume” of anticipation (an “invitation”) means one is no longer living in the moment; one is no longer noticing the two fawns outside, the ripening zucchini. Hirschfield’s poem rises above the mundane when she anthropomorphizes the moment. The speaker has lived with Buddhism long enough that it has become a presence in her life.

The moment averts its eyes to this
impoliteness.

It waits for its guest
to return to … her manners.

But despite the moment’s presence, it is the speaker who is the guest, the one who must remember the “manners” of Buddhist silence -- Buddhist acceptance of the transitory nature of pleasures like traveling, Buddhist acceptance of the here and now. Thinking about the future instead of living in the moment is ultimately “faithless as adultery, / fatal as hope.”

One does not need to know Buddhism to understand the poem’s theme of mindfulness or to appreciate Hirshfield’s fine metaphors such as “hooves’ black teaspoons” and “a city folded so lightly / inside a half-ounce envelope and some ink.”

"One does not need to know Buddhism to understand the poem’s theme of mindfulness,,,"

That's fine and well for you to say, Ms. Great Noodle MA (and you probably knew enough about her that you didn't even have to google to know of her Buddhism) ...

But for moi, without your illuminating post, I was left - on cursory quick-a.m. read - cold and clueless. Now I suddenly "get" it and find the poem quite interesting and even successful ... Somehow it does seem to me that her language erred a tad on the opaque side for someone who knew nothing of her Buddhism to quite get it, but perhaps i just hadn't had my second coffee yet (which I am now - but you, MA, get all the credit for my sense of illumination).

And now it strikes me that her title is very tongue-in-cheek if not sardonic ... Beware of things called "invitations" that suddenly thrust you into future imaginings ... mind racing ("is there a later train?") etc..

thanks, MA ...

z

And now it strikes me that her title is very tongue-in-cheek if not sardonic

exactly

well, actually....

i was rushing out the door this morning when i posted above and didn't really say hat I intended. I don't read the title so much as tongue-in-cheek or sardonic (although there's a little bit of that, to me, in it) but more I think she was being a bit subversive - about how subversive "invitations" can be ... Once I read it through a Buddhist lens, I would say that she titled it "Invitation" to call attention to how it really could as easily be called "Seduction" or "Temptation" ... that in every invitation that beckons us to consider what could be as opposed to what is, there lies a serious potential derailing (and i don't think she was actually being very 'tongue in cheek' about it - Maybe she was but that's not really how I read her tone). So just to clarify ... Now back to work ... :-) with, alas, no time really to explore all the other poems of hers I see you have posted in the interim ... not for a couple of days anyway ...

z