3.16.2026

THEY COULD TEACH YOU

Photo: Steppeland–Lutgarde De Brouwer

     with Jane Hirshfield

There’s a spectrum you don’t see when you design your words to wind
like tinsel around the trunks and tall crowns of linguistic trees.

Whole schools of lumen may pass you by if your vision darkens
under the fluorescence of the everyday. The penitents

in procession could teach you what it is to be an icon
on that road where the first step leads to disgrace. They grew old, thinned
 
of bone and ambition. Should you seek them out in a dark wood
wandering, you’ll find their shades, radiant in diminishment.

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CRAFT NOTE

This poem is a variation on the golden shovel, a form invented by the poet Terrance Hayes. Traditionally, the golden shovel takes one line from an existing poem and uses each of that line’s words once, as the final word of a line in a new poem. For this poem, instead of borrowing a single line from Jane Hirshfield’s “Autumn,” I used the line-ending words of her poem to end the lines in mine (but with a homonym to end line 1). For those keeping track, I chose a fifteen-syllable line for my poem. Here is Hirshfield’s poem, first published in The Paris Review, issue 109, winter 1988:

Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens—
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.

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Welcome, new subscribers, and thank you. From time to time I dip into the archive and repost a poem you probably haven’t seen. For readers who remember seeing this poem before, I hope you enjoyed it then and hope you’ve enjoyed it this time, too.