Language can eclipse reality. The names we give things are useful as labels, but they also generalize and standardize till we no longer see the thing before us. Here is a horse, we think, and having identified it, we stop looking, stop seeing. We may as well have become blind. This is why we turn to literature. We’re hungry for the reality that has been obscured, and we know that language can be manipulated creatively to bring it back into being. Jane Hirshfield’s poem “After Work” shows us what happens when language is liberated in this way.

I stop the car along the pasture edge,
gather up bags of corncobs from the back,
and get out.
Two whistles, one for each,
and familiar sounds draw close in darkness—
cadence of hoof on hardened bottomland,
twinned blowing of air through nostrils curious, flared.
They come, deepened and muscular movements
conjured out of sleep: each small noise and scent
heavy with earth, simple beyond communion,
beyond the stretched out hand from which they calmly
take corncobs, pulling away as I hold
until the mid-points snap.
They are careful of my finger,
offering that animal-knowledge,
the respect which is due to strangers;
and in the night, their mares’ eyes shine, reflecting stars,
the entire, outer light of the world here.

Notice how the mares are not named till the very end. Sounds and scents move towards us out of the darkness, emerging as from the depths of sleep—the cadence of hooves, the blowing of air, nostrils flaring. We get to see and hear and put together the raw sensations, but the horse is never named. Instead, she appears. The poet uses words, not to define her, but to conjure her into being. 

An underlying impulse of creative writers is, ironically enough, to deprive us of language. They seek to lay the world bare, unveiling its presence. When the mares appear, they are not “mares” but a wondrous emanation of the universe. What if we were to set this challenge for ourselves as writers when we set out to describe the life before us—that we lose ourselves in what we see so completely, we forget its name and see the entire cosmos revealed. The “entire, outer light of the world here.”