by Mary Oliver
and decay, and rebirth,
and know my vision for a falsehood.
Now I see him coming from the house —
I see him on his knees,
cutting away the diseased, the superfluous,
coaxing the new,
knowing that the hour of fulfillment
is buried in years of patience —
yet willing to labor like that
on the mortal wheel.
Oh, what good it does the heart
to know it isn’t magic!
Like the human child I am
I rush to imitate —
I watch him as he bends
among the leaves and vines
to hook some weed or other;
even when I do not see him,
I think of him there
raking and trimming, stirring up
those sheets of fire
between the smothering weights of earth,
the wild and shapeless air.
II
ORION
I love Orion, his fiery body, his ten stars,
his flaring points of reference, his shining dogs.
“It is winter,” he says.
“We must eat,” he says. Our gloomy
and passionate teacher.
Miles below
in the cold woods, with the mouse and the owl,
with the clearness of water sheeted and hidden,
with the reason for the wind forever a secret,
he descends and sits with me, his voice
like the snapping of bones.
Behind him
everything is so black and unclassical; behind him
I don’t know anything, not even
my own mind.
ONE OR TWO THINGS
1
Don’t bother me.
I’ve just
been born.
2
The butterfly’s loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes
for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.
3
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,
4
which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.
5
One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightning — some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.
6
But to lift the hoof!
For that you need
an idea.
7
For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished
into the world.
POEM
The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning
in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is —
so it enters us —
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.
MARSH HAWKS
In the morning they glide
just above the rough plush
of the marshlands,
as though on leashes,
long-tailed and with
yard-wide wings
tipped upward, like
dark Vs; then they suddenly fall
in response to their wish,
which is always the same —
to succeed again and again.
What they eat
is neither fruit nor grain,
what they cry out
is sharper than a sharp word.
At night they don’t exist, except
in our dreams, where they fly
like mad things, unleashed
and endlessly hungry.
But in the day
they are always there gliding
and when they descend to the marsh
they are swift, and then so quiet
they could be anything —
a rock, an uprise of earth,
a scrap of fallen tree,
a patch of flowers
casting their whirling shadow.
BOWING TO THE EMPRESS
Through the forest,
through the branches
of shagbarks and walnuts,
through the feathers
of the February snow,
she flows
to her nest
of a thousand
broken and braided sticks,
to her chicks
yelping like tiny wolves,
like downy
emperors for her return,
for her attention,
for red meat,
and you know
theirs is a decent task
in the scheme of things —
the hunters,
the rapacious
plucking up the timid
like so many soft jewels.
They are what keeps everything
enough, but not too many —
and so you bow
to the lightning of her eyes,
the pick of her beak,
the swale of her appetite,
and even to her shadow
over the field — when it passes
you can hardly breathe,
the world is that bright,
your senses so sharply tuned
by the notion of oblivion —
those black wings beating
at the light.
THE TURTLE
breaks from the blue-black
skin of the water, dragging her shell
with its mossy scutes
across the shallows and through the rushes
and over the mudflats, to the uprise,
to the yellow sand,
to dig with her ungainly feet
a nest, and hunker there spewing
her white eggs down
into the darkness, and you think
of her patience, her fortitude,
her determination to complete
what she was born to do —
>
and then you realize a greater thing —
she doesn’t consider
what she was born to do.
She’s only filled
with an old blind wish.
It isn’t even hers but came to her
in the rain or the soft wind,
which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.
She can’t see
herself apart from the rest of the world
or the world from what she must do
every spring.
Crawling up the high hill,
luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin,
she doesn’t dream,
she knows
she is a part of the pond she lives in,
the tall trees are her children,
the birds that swim above her
are tied to her by an unbreakable string.
SUNRISE
You can
die for it —
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But
this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought
of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun
blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.
TWO KINDS OF DELIVERANCE
1
Last night the geese came back,
slanting fast
from the blossom of the rising moon down
to the black pond. A muskrat
swimming in the twilight saw them and hurried
to the secret lodges to tell everyone
spring had come.
And so it had.
By morning when I went out
the last of the ice had disappeared, blackbirds
sang on the shores. Every year
the geese, returning,
do this, I don’t
know how.
2
The curtains opened and there was
an old man in a headdress of feathers,
leather leggings and a vest made
from the skin of some animal. He danced
in a kind of surly rapture, and the trees
in the fields far away
began to mutter and suck up their long roots.
Slowly they advanced until they stood
pressed to the schoolhouse windows.
3
I don’t know
lots of things but I know this: next year
when spring
flows over the starting point I’ll think I’m going to
drown in the shimmering miles of it and then
one or two birds will fly me over
the threshold.
As for the pain
of others, of course it tries to be
abstract, but then
there flares up out of a vanished wilderness, like fire,
still blistering: the wrinkled face
of an old Chippewa
smiling, hating us,
dancing for his life.
THE SWIMMER
All winter the water
has crashed over
the cold sand. Now
it breaks over the thin
branch of your body.
You plunge down, you swim
two or three strokes, you dream
of lingering
in the luminous undertow
but can’t; you splash
through the bursting
white blossoms,
the silk sheets — gasping,
you rise and struggle
lightward, finding your way
through the blue ribs back
to the sun, and emerge
as though for the first time.
Poor fish,
poor flesh,
you can never forget.
Once every wall was water,
the soft strings filled
with a perfect nourishment,
pumping your body full
of appetite, elaborating
your stubby bones, tucking in,
like stars,
the seeds of restlessness
that made you, finally,
swim toward the world,
kicking and shouting
but trailing a mossy darkness —
a dream that would never breathe air
and was hinged to your wildest joy
like a shadow.
MILKWEED
The milkweed now with their many pods are standing
like a country of dry women.
The wind lifts their flat leaves and drops them.
This is not kind, but they retain a certain crisp glamour;
moreover, it’s easy to believe
each one was once young and delicate, also
frightened; also capable
of a certain amount of rough joy.
I wish you would walk with me out into the world.
I wish you could see what has to happen, how
each one crackles like a blessing
over its thin children as they rush away.
THE WAVES
The sea
isn’t a place
but a fact, and
a mystery
under its green and black
cobbled coat that never
stops moving.
When death
happens on land, on some
hairpin piece of road,
we crawl past,
imagining
over and over that moment
of disaster. After the storm
the other boats didn’t
hesitate — they spun out
from the rickety pier, the men
bent to the nets or turning
the weedy winches.
Surely the sea
is the most beautiful fact
in our universe, but
you won’t find a fisherman
who will say so;
what they say is,
See you later.
Gulls white as angels scream
as they float in the sun
just off the sterns;
everything is here
that you could ever imagine.
And the bones
of the drowned fisherman
are returned, half a year later,
in the glittering,
laden nets.
LANDSCAPE
Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about
spiritual patience? Isn’t it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?
Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.
Every morning, so far, I’m alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky — as though
all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thic
k wings.
THE SHARK
The domed head rose above the water, white
as a spill of milk. It had taken the hook. It swirled,
and all they could see then was the grinding
and breaking of water, its thrashing, the teeth
in the grin and grotto of its impossible mouth.
The line they refused to cut ran down like a birth cord
into the packed and strategic muscles.
The sun shone.
It was not a large boat. The beast plunged
with all it had caught onto, deep
under the green waves — a white
retching thing, it turned
toward the open sea. And it was hours before
they came home, hauling their bloody prize,
well-gaffed. A hundred gulls followed,
picking at the red streams,
as it sang its death song of vomit and bubbles,
as the blood ran from its mouth
that had no speech to rail against this matter —
speech, that gives us all there may be of the future —
speech, that makes all the difference, we like to say.
And I say: in the wilderness of our wit
we will all cry out last words — heave and spit them
into the shattering universe someday, to someone.
Whoever He is, count on it: He won’t answer.
The inventor is like the hunter — each
in the crease and spasm of the thing about to be done
is lost in his work. All else is peripheral,
remote, unfelt. The connections have broken.
Consider the evening:
the shark winched into the air; men
lifting the last bloody hammers.
And Him, somewhere, ponderously lifting another world,
setting it free to spin, if it can,
in a darkness you can’t imagine.
STORM IN MASSACHUSETTS, SEPTEMBER 1982
A hot day,
a clear heaven — then
clouds bulge
over the horizon
and the wind turns
like a hundred black swans
and the first faint noise
begins.
I think
of my good life,
I think
of other lives
being blown apart
in field after distant field.
