by Mary Oliver
It took hours
but finally
in the half-drowned light
in the silence
of the summer evening
they woke
from fitful naps,
they stepped
in their old good natures
toward us
look look
into their eyes
bright as planets
under the long lashes
here is such happiness when you speak their names!
here is such unforced love!
here is such shyness such courage!
here is the shining rudimentary soul
here is hope retching, the world as it is
here is the black the red the bottomless pool.
At the Shore
This morning
wind that light-limbed dancer was all
over the sky while
ocean slapped up against
the shore's black-beaked rocks
row after row of waves
humped and fringed and exactly
different from each other and
above them one white gull
whirled slant and fast then
dipped its wings turned
in a soft and descending decision its
leafy feet touched
pale water just beyond
breakage of waves it settled
shook itself opened
its spoony beak cranked
like a pump. Listen!
Here is the white and silky trumpet of nothing.
Here is the beautiful Nothing, body of happy,
meaningless fire, wildfire, shaking the heart.
At Great Pond
At Great Pond
the sun, rising,
scrapes his orange breast
on the thick pines,
and down tumble
a few orange feathers into
the dark water.
On the far shore
a white bird is standing
like a white candle—
or a man, in the distance,
in the clasp of some meditation—
while all around me the lilies
are breaking open again
from the black cave
of the night.
Later, I will consider
what I have seen—
what it could signify—
what words of adoration I might
make of it, and to do this
I will go indoors to my desk—
I will sit in my chair—
I will look back
into the lost morning
in which I am moving, now,
like a swimmer,
so smoothly,
so peacefully,
I am almost the lily—
almost the bird vanishing over the water
on its sleeves of light.
Part 2
WEST WIND
WEST WIND
1
If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me? Even then? Since we're bound to be something, why not together. Imagine! Two little stones, two fleas under the wing of a gull, flying along through the fog! Or, ten blades of grass. Ten loops of honeysuckle, all flung against each other, at the edge of Race Road! Beach plums! Snowflakes, coasting into the winter woods, making a very small sound, like this
soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
as they marry the dusty bodies of the pitch-pines. Or, rain— that gray light running over the sea, pocking it, lacquering it, coming, all morning and afternoon, from the west wind's youth and abundance and jollity—pinging and jangling down upon the roofs of Provincetown.
2
You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart's little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistakable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming—then row, row for your life toward it.
3
And the speck of my heart, in my shed of flesh and bone, began to sing out, the way the sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a mouth and a tongue, if the sky had a throat, if god wasn't just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up. Where am I? Even the rough words come to me now, quick as thistles. Who made your tyrant's body, your thirst, your delving, your gladness? Oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire! Get away from me. Come closer.
4
But how did you come burning down like a
wild needle, knowing
just where my heart was?
5
There are night birds, in the garden below us, singing.
Oh, listen!
For a moment I thought it was
our own bodies.
6
When the sun goes down
the roses
fling off their red dresses
and put on their black dresses
the wind is coming
over the sandy streets
of the town called moonlight
with his long arms
with his silver mouth
his hands
humorous at first
then serious
then crazy
touching their faces their dark petals
until they begin rising and falling:
the honeyed seizures.
All day they have been busy being roses
gazing responsible over the sand
into the sky into the blue ocean
so now why not
a little comfort
a little rippling pleasure.
***
You there, puddled in lamplight at your midnight desk—
you there, rewriting nature
so anyone can understand it—
what will you say about the roses—
their sighing, their tossing—
and the want of the heart,
and the trill of the heart,
and the burning mouth
of the wind?
7
We see Bill only occasionally, when we stop by the antique shop that's on the main hot highway to Charlottesville. Usually he's alone—his wife is dead—but sometimes his son will be with him, or idling just outside in the yard. Once M. bought a small glass ship from the boy, it had chips of colored glass for sails and cost two dollars, the boy was greatly pleased.
Today Bill tells us—for a mockingbird has begun to sing— how a friend came during the summer and filled a bowl with fruit from the cherry tree. Then, leaving the bowl on the stoop, he went inside to sit with Bill at the kitchen table. Together Bill and his friend watched the mockingbird come to the bowl, take the cherries one by one, fly back across the yard and drop them under the branches of the tree. When the bowl was empty the bird settled again in the leaves and began to sing vigorously.
At the back of the shop and here and there on the dusty shelves are piled the useless broken things one couldn't ever sell—bits of rusty metal, and odd pieces of china, a cup or a plate with a fraction of its design still clear: a garden, or a span of country bridge leading from one happiness or another, or part of a house. Once Bill told us, almost shyly, how much the boy is coming to resemble his mother. Through the open window we can hear the mockingbird, still young, still lucky, wild beak kissing and chuckling as it flutters and struts along the avenue of song.
8
The young, tall English poet—soon to die, soon to sail on his small boa
t into the blue haze and then the storm and then under the gray waves' spinning threshold—went over to Pisa to meet a friend; met him; spent with him a sunny afternoon. I love this poet, which means nothing here or there, but is like a garden in my heart. So my love is a gift to myself. And I think of him, on that July afternoon in Pisa, while his friend Hunt told him stories pithy and humorous, of their friends in England, so that he began to laugh, so that his tall, lean body shook, and his long legs couldn't hold him, and he had to lean up against the building, seized with laughter, abundant and unstoppable; and so he leaned in the wild sun, against the stones of the building, with the tears flying from his eyes—full of foolishness, howling, hanging on to the stones, crawling with laughter, clasping his own body as it began to fly apart in the nonsense, the sweetness, the intelligence, the bright happiness falling, like tiny gold flowers, like the sunlight itself, the lilt of Hunt's voice, on this simple afternoon, with a friend, in Pisa.
9
And what did you think love would be like? A summer day? The brambles in their places, and the long stretches of mud? Flowers in every field, in every garden, with their soft beaks and their pastel shoulders? On one street after another, the litter ticks in the gutter. In one room after another, the lovers meet, quarrel, sicken, break apart, cry out. One or two leap from windows. Most simply lean, exhausted, their thin arms on the sill. They have done all that they could. The golden eagle, that lives not far from here, has perhaps a thousand tiny feathers flowing from the back of its head, each one shaped like an infinitely small but perfect spear.
10
Dark is as dark does.
***
Something with the smallest wings shakes itself
from under a thumb of bark.
***
The ocean breathes in its silver jacket.
***
Outside, hanging on the trellis, in the moonlight,
the flowers are opening, each one
as fancy in its unfurl as a difficult thought.
***
So we cross the dark together.
***
Outside: the almost liquid beauty of the flowers.
***
Now the linnets wake.
Now the pearls of their voices are falling
in the morning light.
***
Did we sleep long? Is it this life still, or
is it the next life, already? Are we gone, then?
Are we there?
***
How will we ever know?
11
Now only the humorous shadows that the moon makes, playing the corners of furniture, flung and dropped clothing, the backs of books, the architecture of electronics, and so on. The bed that level and soft rise is empty. We are gone.
So, say that dreams, possibilities, emotions, while we are gone from the house, take shape. Say there are thirty at least, one to represent each year, and more leaning in the doorway between the slope of the beach and the pale walls of the rooms, just moon-gazing for a moment or two, before they come into that starry garden, our house at night.
Some of those thirty are as awkward as children, romping and gripping. Others have become birds, clouds, trees dipping their heart-shaped leaves, that long song. Here and there a face that won't trans- form—eyes of stone, expressions of pettiness and sulk. And now it is winter, and in the black air the snow is falling in its own sweet leisure, for its own reasons. And now the snow has deepened, and created form: two white ponies. How they gallop in the waves. How they steam, and turn to look for each other. How they love the clouds and the tender, long grass and the horizons and the hills. How they nuzzle, how they nicker, how they reach down, at the unclosable spring in the notch of the pasture, to be replenished.
12
The cricket did not actually seek the hearth, but the thicket of carpet beneath the refrigerator. The whirring above was company, and from it issued night and day the most prized gift of the gods: warmth. Especially in the evenings the cricket was happy, and sang. Later, in the night, it crept out. There was not a single night when it did not find, sooner or later, a sweet crumb, and a small plump seed of some sort between the floorboards. Thus, it got used to hope. It revised altogether its idea of what the world was like, and of what was going to happen next, or, even, eventually. It thought: how sufficient are these empty rooms! It thought: here I am still, in my black suit, warm and content—and drew a little music from its dark thighs. As though the twilight underneath the refrigerator were the world. As though the winter would never come.
13
It is midnight, or almost.
Out in the world the wind stretches
bundles back into itself like a hundred
bolts of lace then stretches again
flows itself over the windowsill and into the room
it scatters the papers from the desk
it is in love with disorganization
now the manuscript is on the floor, and reshuffled
now the chapters have married each other
now the alphabet is lost now the white curtains are tossing wing on wing
now the body of the wind snaps
it sniffs the closet it touches into the pockets of the coats
it touches the shells upon the shelves
it touches the tops of the books
it slides along the walls
now the lamplight wavers
as the body of the wind swings over the light
outside a million stars are burning
now the ocean calls to the wind
now the wind like water slips under the sash
into the yard the garden the long black sky
in my room after such disturbance I sit, smiling.
I pick up a pencil, I put it down, I pick it up again.
I am thinking of you.
I am always thinking of you.
Part 3
Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives—
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early summer,
feel like?
Do you think this world is only an entertainment for you?
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?
Well, there is time left—
fields everywhere invite you into them.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!
To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!
To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tiplets of the honeysuckle, that have opened
/>
in the night.
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
***
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
While the soul, after all, is only a window,
and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.
***
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe
I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge-red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.
***
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!
A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.
***
Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?
And I would touch the faces of the daisies,
and I would bow down
to think about it.
That was then, which hasn't ended yet.
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.
I climb. I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to the editors of the following magazines in
which some of these poems, sometimes in slightly different
form, have previously been printed.
Amicus, The cricket...; At the Shore; Sand Dabs, Three
Appalachia, Black Oaks, The Dog Has Run Off Again
