February 29
Jane Hirshfield
An extra day –
Like the painting’s fifth cow,
who looks out directly,
straight toward you,
from inside her black and white spots.
An extra day –
Accidental, surely:
the made calendar stumbling over the real
as a drunk trips over a threshold
too low to see.
An extra day –
With a second cup of black coffee.
A friendly but businesslike phone call.
A mailed-back package.
Some extra work, but not too much –
just one day’s worth, exactly.
An extra day –
Not unlike the space
between a door and its frame
when one room is lit and another is not,
and one changes into the other
as a woman exchanges a scarf.
An extra day –
Extraordinarily like any other.
And still
there is some generosity to it,
like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.
About this poem
“Behind this poem, written Feb. 29, 2012, was the death of a friend. I had, months before, brought her the present of a traditional bamboo slat painted reproduction of a famous Chinese painting. She had commented, with her customary inhabitance of all things from the inside, how hard it is to paint a cow so well from the front. Her death was unexpected, and a letter from her I had not wanted to put away was still out on my kitchen table. My year’s extra day circled around it.” – Jane Hirshfield
About Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is the author of “The Beauty” (Knopf, 2015) and “Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World” (Knopf, 2015). She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in San Francisco’s Bay Area.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
Excerpted from “The Beauty” by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright (c) 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
