by Mary Oliver
Do dreams lie? Once I was a fish
crying for my sisters in the sprawling
crossroads of the delta.
Once among the reeds I found
a boat, as thin and lonely
as a young tree. Nearby
the forest sizzled with the afternoon rain.
Home, I said.
In every language there is a word for it.
In the body itself, climbing
those walls of white thunder, past those green
temples, there is also
a word for it.
I said, home.
CONSEQUENCES
Afterward
I found under my left shoulder
the most curious wound.
As though I had leaned against
some whirring thing,
it bleeds secretly.
Nobody knows its name.
Afterward,
for a reason more right than rational,
I thought of that fat German
in his ill-fitting overcoat
in the woods near Vienna, realizing
that the birds were going farther and farther away, and
no matter how fast he walked
he couldn’t keep up.
How does any of us live in this world?
One thing compensates for another, I suppose.
Sometimes what’s wrong does not hurt at all, but rather
shines like a new moon.
I often think of Beethoven
rising, when he couldn’t sleep,
stumbling through the dust and crumpled papers,
yawning, settling at the piano,
inking in rapidly note after note after note.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Hardly a day passes I don’t think of him
in the asylum: younger
than I am now, trudging the long road down
through madness toward death.
Everywhere in this world his music
explodes out of itself, as he
could not. And now I understand
something so frightening, and wonderful —
how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing
through crossroads, sticking
like lint to the familiar. So!
Hardly a day passes I don’t
think of him: nineteen, say, and it is
spring in Germany
and he has just met a girl named Clara.
He turns the corner,
he scrapes the dirt from his soles,
he runs up the dark staircase, humming.
CLAMMING
I rise
by lamplight and hurry out
to the bay
where the gulls like white
ghosts swim
in the shallows —
I rake and rake
down to the gray stones,
the clenched quahogs,
the deadweight
fruits of the sea that bear
inside their walls
a pink and salty
one-lunged life;
we are all
one family
but love ourselves
best. Later I sit
on the dawn-soaked shore and set
a thin blade
into the slightly
hissing space between
the shells and slash through
the crisp life-muscle; I put
what is in the shell
into my mouth, and when
the gulls come begging
I feed them too.
How detailed and hopeful,
how exact
everything is in the light,
on the rippling sand,
at the edge of the turning tide —
its upheaval —
its stunning proposal —
its black, anonymous roar.
THE FIRE
That winter it seemed the city
was always burning — night after night
the flames leaped, the ladders pitched forward.
Scorched but alive, the homeless wailed
as they ran for the cold streets.
That winter my mind had turned around,
shedding, like leaves, its bolts of information —
drilling down, through history,
toward my motionless heart.
Those days I was willing, but frightened.
What I mean is, I wanted to live my life
but I didn’t want to do what I had to do
to go on, which was: to go back.
All winter the fires kept burning,
the smoke swirled, the flames grew hotter.
I began to curse, to stumble and choke.
Everything, solemnly, drove me toward it —
the crying out, that’s so hard to do.
Then over my head the red timbers floated,
my feet were slippers of fire, my voice
crashed at the truth, my fists
smashed at the flames to find the door —
wicked and sad, mortal and bearable,
it fell open forever as I burned.
BANYAN
Something screamed
from the fringes of the swamp.
It was Banyan,
the old merchant.
It was the hundred-legged
tree, walking again.
The cattle egrets
flew out into the sunlight
like so many pieces of white ribbon.
The watersnakes slipped down the banks
like green hooks and floated away.
Banyan groaned.
A knee down in the east corner buckled,
a gray shin rose, and the root,
wet and hairy,
sank back in, a little closer.
Then a voice like a howling wind deep in the leaves said:
I’ll tell you a story
about a seed.
About a seed flying into a tree, and eating it
little by little.
About a small tree that becomes a huge tree
and wants to travel.
Listen, said the voice.
This is your dream.
I’m only stopping here for a little while.
Don’t be afraid.
WHISPERS
Have you ever
tried to
slide into
the heaven of sensation and met
you know not what
resistance but it
held you back? have you ever
turned on your shoulder
helplessly, facing
the white moon, crying
let me in? have you dared to count
the months as they pass and the years
while you imagined pleasure,
shining like honey, locked in some
secret tree? have you dared to feel
the isolation gathering
intolerably and recognized
what kinds of explosions can follow
from an intolerable condition? have you
walked out in the mornings
wherever you are in the world to consider
all those gleaming and reasonless lives
that flow outward and outward, easily, to the last
moment the bulbs of their lungs,
their bones and their appetites,
can carry them? oh, have you
looked wistfully into
the flushed bodies of the flowers? have you stood,
staring out over the swamps, the swirling rivers
where the birds like tossing fires
flash through the trees, their bodies
exchanging a certain happiness
in the sleek, amazing
humdrum of nature’s design —
blood’s heaven, spirit’s haven, to which
you cannot belong?
DRIVING THROUGH THE WIND RIVER RESERVATION: A POEM OF BLACK BEAR
In the time of snow, in t
he time of sleep.
The rivers themselves changed into links
of white iron, holding everything. Once
she woke deep in the leaves under
the fallen tree and peered
through the loose bark and saw him:
a tall white bone
with thick shoulders, like a wrestler,
roaring the saw-toothed music
of wind and sleet, legs pumping
up and down the hills.
Well, she thought, he’ll wear himself out
running around like that.
She slept again
while he drove on through the trees,
snapping off the cold pines, gasping,
rearranging over and over
the enormous drifts. Finally one morning
the sun rose up like a pot of blood
and his knees buckled.
Well, she whispered from the leaves,
that’s that. In the distance
the ice began to boom and wrinkle
and a dampness
that could not be defeated began
to come from her, her breathing
enlarged, oh, tender mountain, she rearranged
herself so that the cubs
could slide from her body, so that the rivers
would flow.
MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE
Ahead of me
they were lighting their fires
in the dark forests
of death.
Should I name them?
Their names make a long branch of sound.
You know them.
I know
death is the fascinating snake
under the leaves, sliding
and sliding; I know
the heart loves him too, can’t
turn away, can’t
break the spell. Everything
wants to enter the slow thickness,
aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost.
Wants to be stone.
That time
I wanted to die
somebody
was playing the piano
in the room with me.
It was Mozart.
It was Beethoven.
It was Bruckner.
In the kitchen
a man with one ear
was painting a flower.
Later,
in the asylum,
I began to pick through the red rivers
of confusion;
I began to take apart
the deep stitches
of nightmares.
This was good, human work.
This had nothing to do with laying down a path of words
that could throttle,
or soften,
the human heart.
Meanwhile,
Yeats, in love and anger,
stood beside his fallen friends;
Whitman kept falling
through the sleeve of ego.
In the back fields,
beyond the locked windows,
a young man who couldn’t live long and knew it
was listening to a plain brown bird
that kept singing in the deep leaves,
that kept urging from him
some wild and careful words.
You know that
important and eloquent defense
of sanity.
I forgive them
their unhappiness,
I forgive them
for walking out of the world.
But I don’t forgive them
for turning their faces away,
for taking off their veils
and dancing for death —
for hurtling
toward oblivion
on the sharp blades
of their exquisite poems, saying:
this is the way.
I was, of course, all that time
coming along
behind them, and listening
for advice.
And the man who merely
washed Michelangelo’s brushes, kneeling
on the damp bricks, staring
every day at the colors pouring out of them,
lived to be a hundred years old.
STARFISH
In the sea rocks,
in the stone pockets
under the tide’s lip,
in water dense as blindness
they slid
like sponges,
like too many thumbs.
I knew this, and what I wanted
was to draw my hands back
from the water — what I wanted
was to be willing
to be afraid.
But I stayed there,
I crouched on the stone wall
while the sea poured its harsh song
through the sluices,
while I waited for the gritty lightning
of their touch, while I stared
down through the tide’s leaving
where sometimes I could see them —
their stubborn flesh
lounging on my knuckles.
What good does it do
to lie all day in the sun
loving what is easy?
It never grew easy,
but at last I grew peaceful:
all summer
my fear diminished
as they bloomed through the water
like flowers, like flecks
of an uncertain dream,
while I lay on the rocks, reaching
into the darkness, learning
little by little to love
our only world.
THE JOURNEY
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations —
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.
A VISITOR
My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.
But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open
and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside hi
m,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.
THE HOUSE
It grows larger,
wall after wall
sliding
on some miraculous arrangement
of panels,
blond and weightless
as balsa, making space
for windows, alcoves,
more rooms, stairways
and passages, all
bathed
in light, with here
and there the green
flower of a tree,
vines, streams
casually
breaking through —
what a change
from the cramped
room at the center
where I began, where I crouched
and was safe, but could hardly
breathe! Day after day
I labor at it;
night after night
I keep going —
I’m clearing new ground,
I’m lugging boards,
I’m measuring,
I’m hanging sheets of glass,
I’m nailing down the hardwoods,
the thresholds —
I’m hinging the doors —
once they are up they will lift
their easy latches, they will open
like wings.
STANLEY KUNITZ
I used to imagine him
coming from the house, like Merlin
strolling with important gestures
through the garden
where everything grows so thickly,
where birds sing, little snakes lie
on the boughs, thinking of nothing
but their own good lives,
where petals float upward,
their colors exploding,
and trees open their moist
pages of thunder —
it has happened every summer for years.
But now I know more
about the great wheel of growth,
