by Mary Oliver
All over the world —
I’m sure of it —
life is much the same
when it’s going well —
resonant
and unremarkable.
But who,
not under disaster’s seal,
can understand what life is like
when it begins to crumble?
Now the noise is bulbous,
dense, drumming
over the hills,
and approaching.
So safe,
so blank of imagination,
so deadly of heart,
I listen
to those dropped and rolling
rounds of thunder.
They only sound
like gunfire.
ACID
In Jakarta,
among the venders
of flowers and soft drinks,
I saw a child
with a hideous mouth,
begging,
and I knew the wound was made
for a way to stay alive.
What I gave him
wouldn’t keep a dog alive.
What he gave me
from the brown coin
of his sweating face
was a look of cunning.
I carry it
like a bead of acid
to remember how,
once in a while,
you can creep out of your own life
and become someone else —
an explosion
in that nest of wires
we call the imagination.
I will never see him
again, I suppose.
But what of this rag,
this shadow
flung like a boy’s body
into the walls
of my mind, bleeding
their sour taste —
insult and anger,
the great movers?
BLACK SNAKES
Suddenly
there I was
on the warm rocks — fear
like a mallet
slung against
metal — it was
that sudden,
that loud,
though in truth
there was no sound, only
the rough wing of fright
rushing
through our bodies.
One flowed
under the leaves, the other flared
half its length
into the air
against my body, then swirled
away. Once I had steadied,
I thought: how valiant!
and I wished
I had come softly, I wished
they were my dark friends.
For a moment I stared
through the impossible gates.
Then I saw them, under the vines,
coiled, cringing,
wishing me gone
with their stone eyes.
Not knowing what I would do
next, their tongues
shook like fire
at the echoes of my body —
that column of death
plunging
through the delicate woods.
THE MOTHS
There’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know
what kind, that glimmers, it does,
in the daylight,
in mid-May
in the forest, just
as the pink moccasin flowers
are rising.
If you notice anything,
it leads you to notice
more
and more.
And anyway
I was so full of energy.
I was always running around, looking
at this and that.
If I stopped
the pain
was unbearable.
If I stopped and thought, maybe
the world
can’t be saved,
the pain
was unbearable.
Finally, I had noticed enough.
All around me in the forest
the white moths floated.
How long do they live, fluttering
in and out of the shadows?
You aren’t much, I said
one day to my reflection
in a green pond,
and grinned.
The wings of the moths catch the sunlight
and burn
so brightly.
At night, sometimes,
they slip between the pink lobes
of the moccasin flowers and lie there until dawn,
motionless
in those dark halls of honey.
AT SEA
The haze
has us
in a slow, pink
and gray
confusion; everything
we know —
the horizon,
for example,
and the distant
ridge of land —
has vanished,
the boat
glides without a sound
over a sea of curled
and luminous glass,
there are clouds
in the sky wherever
that is, and clouds
in the water,
and maybe
we have entered heaven
already, the happy boat
sliding
like a bee
down the throat of a huge
damp flower.
Some birds,
like streamers of white silk,
approach us, crying.
Ah, yes,
how easy,
how familiar
it seems now,
that long
lovely thrusting up and down
of wings.
1945-1985: POEM FOR THE ANNIVERSARY
Sometimes,
walking for hours through the woods,
I don’t know what I’m looking for,
maybe for something
shy and beautiful to come
frisking out of the undergrowth.
Once a fawn did just that.
My dog didn’t know
what dogs usually do.
And the fawn didn’t know.
As for the doe, she was probably
down in Round Pond, swizzling up
the sweet marsh grass and dreaming
that everything was fine.
The way I’d like to go on living in this world
wouldn’t hurt anything, I’d just go on
walking uphill and downhill, looking around,
and so what if half the time I don’t know
what for —
so what if it doesn’t come
to a hill of beans —
so what if I vote liberal,
and am Jewish,
or Lutheran —
or a game warden —
or a bingo addict —
and smoke a pipe?
In the films of Dachau and Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen
the dead rise from the earth
and are piled in front of us, the starved
stare across forty years,
and lush, green, musical Germany
shows again its iron claw, which won’t
ever be forgotten, which won’t
ever be understood, but which did,
slowly, for years, scrape across Europe
while the rest of the world
did nothing.
Oh, you never saw
such a good leafy place, and
everything was fine, my dog and the fawn
did a little dance,
they didn’t get serious.
Then the fawn clambered away through the leaves
and my gentle dog followed me away.
Oh, you never saw such a garden!
A hundred kinds of flowers in bloom!
A waterfall, for pleasure and nothing else!
> The garden furniture is white,
tables and chairs in the cool shade.
A man sits there, the long afternoon before him.
He is finishing lunch, some kind
of fruit, chicken, and a salad.
A bottle of wine with a thin and beaded neck.
He fills a glass.
You can tell it is real crystal.
He lifts it to his mouth and drinks peacefully.
It is the face of Mengele.
Later
the doe came wandering back in the twilight.
She stepped through the leaves. She hesitated,
sniffing the air.
Then she knew everything.
The forest grew dark.
She nuzzled her child wildly.
AT LOXAHATCHIE
All day
the alligators
lumbered into and out of
the water, herons
stood in the trees
combing their white shoulders,
vultures
floating just under the clouds
were in no hurry —
sooner or later
the mysterious circles
always closed.
I had dreamed of such a place,
but this was my first visit
to the thick parks and the state of mind
called Florida. Streams
wandered everywhere
among the dense mangroves.
At one I paused
to drink, and inside me
the water whispered: And now, like us,
you are a million years old.
But at the same time
the enormous and waxy flowers
of the shrubs around me, whose names
I did not know,
were nodding in the wind and sighing:
Be born! And I knew
whatever my place in this garden
it was not to be what I had always been —
the gardener.
Everywhere the reptiles thrashed
while birds exploded into heavenly
hymns of rough song and the vultures
drifted like black angels and clearly nothing
needed to be saved.
COMING HOME
When we’re driving, in the dark,
on the long road
to Provincetown, which lies empty
for miles, when we’re weary,
when the buildings
and the scrub pines lose
their familiar look,
I imagine us rising
from the speeding car,
I imagine us seeing
everything from another place — the top
of one of the pale dunes
or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea —
and what we see is the world
that cannot cherish us
but which we cherish,
and what we see is our life
moving like that,
along the dark edges
of everything — the headlights
like lanterns
sweeping the blackness —
believing in a thousand
fragile and unprovable things,
looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping
barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me.
THE SUNFLOWERS
Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines
creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and many,
fill all day with the sticky
sugars of the sun.
Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy
but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young —
the important weather,
the wandering crows.
Don’t be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,
which follow the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds —
each one a new life! —
hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,
is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come
and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to the editors of the following magazines, in which some of these poems previously appeared.
AMICUS: Starfish
THE ATLANTIC: Bowing to the Empress, A Visitor, Milkweed, Acid
BOSTON REVIEW: Knife
COLUMBIA: Driving Through the Wind River Reservation: A Poem of Black Bear
COUNTRY JOURNAL: At Sea, Marsh Hawks, The Chance to Love Everything
GEORGIA REVIEW: Dreams, At Loxahatchie, Two Kinds of Deliverance
HARVARD MAGAZINE: Black Snakes, Orion
IRONWOOD: Consequences
KENYON REVIEW: Poem, Rage, The Swimmer, Robert Schumann, Shadows
MEMPHIS STATE REVIEW: Stanley Kunitz
PARTISAN REVIEW: Sunrise
POETRY: The Moths, Banyan, The Shark
RACCOON: The Sunflowers
VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW: The River
WESTERN HUMANITIES REVIEW: Trilliums, Wild Geese, The Turtle, The Journey, Clamming, Morning Poem
My thanks also to the Artists Foundation of Boston, Massachusetts, for a grant during the time I was completing this manuscript.
