“All the Difficult Hours and Minutes” by Jane Hirshfield

This last week, Jane Hirshfield came out with her new volume of poetry — Come, Thief.  “All the Difficult Hours and Minutes” is one of the poems from this new collection.

All the difficult hours and minutes
are like salted plums in a jar.
Wrinkled, turned steeply into themselves,
they mutter something the color of shark fins to the glass.
Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.
First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.