Presumed most of the time to be passing,
yet importunate as a toddler
who demanded her own way,
as a phone that would not stop ringing long after it should.

Unignorable pavement slap of the gone-flat tire.

All afternoon the thunder was interrupted by sunshine.
All night the rain was interrupted by trees and roofs.

And still, as rusting steel is uninterrupted by dryness
and hunger uninterrupted by sleep,
interruption and non-interruption sat in the day’s container
as salt sits in milk, one whiteness disguised by another.

As a fish in a tank is interrupted by glass, and turns,
a person’s fate is to continue
despite,
until.

Death: an interruption not passing,
weighing
one hundred and fifty eight pounds,
carried on cut plywood with yellow straps.

Birth: an interruption between
two windows,
trying to think of a joke, a tune, that is new.

Between them:
this navigation by echolocation and Lidar,
the weathers of avalanche, earthquake, tsunami,
firestorm, drought;
a moment that sets down – gently, sleepily – its half-read novel
on the bedside table whose side turned toward the wall stays unpainted,
confident the story will be there again come morning.

Jane Hirshfield’s most recent books are The Beauty and Ten Windows: How great poems transform the world (both 2015). A chancellor emerita of The Academy of American Poets, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.