by Mary Oliver
OTHER BOOKS BY MARY OLIVER
POETRY
No Voyage and Other Poems
The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems
Twelve Moons
American Primitive
Dream Work
House of Light
New and Selected Poems Volume One
White Pine
West Wind
The Leaf and the Cloud
What Do We Know
Owls and Other Fantasies
Why I Wake Early
Blue Iris
New and Selected Poems Volume Two
Thirst
Red Bird
The Truro Bear and Other Poems
Evidence
PROSE
A Poetry Handbook
Blue Pastures
Rules for the Dance
Winter Hours
Long Life
Our World (with photographs by Molly Malone Cook)
AUDIO
At Blackwater Pond
Many Miles
For Anne Taylor
CONTENTS
What Can I Say
Of Time
On the Beach
How Perfectly
How I Go to the Woods
A Fox in the Dark
Just Around the House, Early in the Morning
Tom Dancer’s Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone
Passing the Unworked Field
For Example
Percy Wakes Me (Fourteen)
Today
Swan
Beans Green and Yellow
It Is Early
How Many Days
More of the Unfinishable Fox Story
The Riders
The Poet Dreams of the Classroom
Dancing in Mexico
The Sweetness of Dogs (Fifteen)
Bird in the Pepper Tree
In Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama
April
Torn
Wind in the Pines
The Living Together
We Cannot Know
The Poet Dreams of the Mountain
Mist in the Morning, Nothing Around Me but Sand and Roses
The Last Word About Fox (Maybe)
How Heron Comes
When
Trees
In Your Hands
I Own a House
I Worried
Lark Ascending
Don’t Hesitate
In the Darkness
Four Sonnets
Trying to Be Thoughtful in the First Brights of Dawn
More Evidence
Whispered Poem
The Poet Is Told to Fill Up More Pages
AFTERWORD
Percy
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once. Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.
—Rilke, Duino Elegies
’Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live.
—Emerson, Beauty
What Can I Say
What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.
Of Time
Don’t even ask how rapidly the hummingbird
lives his life.
You can’t imagine. A thousand flowers a day,
a little sleep, then the same again, then
he vanishes.
I adore him.
Yet I adore also the drowse of mountains.
And in the human world, what is time?
In my mind there is Rumi, dancing.
There is Li Po drinking from the winter stream.
There is Hafiz strolling through Shariz, his feet
loving the dust.
On the Beach
On the beach, at dawn:
four small stones clearly
hugging each other.
How many kinds of love
might there be in the world,
and how many formations might they make
and who am I ever
to imagine I could know
such a marvelous business?
When the sun broke
it poured willingly its light
over the stones
that did not move, not at all,
just as, to its always generous term,
it shed its light on me,
my own body that loves,
equally, to hug another body.
How Perfectly
How perfectly
and neatly
opens the pink rose
this bright morning,
the sun warm
on my shoulders,
its heat
on the opening petals.
Possibly
it is the smallest,
the least important event
at this moment
in the whole world.
Yet I stand there,
utterly happy.
How I Go to the Woods
Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.
I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.
Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.
A Fox in the Dark
A fox goes by
in the headlights
like an electric shock.
Then he pauses
at the edge of the road
and the heart, if it is still alive,
feels something—
a yearning
for which we have no name
but which we may remember,
years later,
in the darkness,
upon some other empty road.
Just Around the House, Early in the Morning
Though I have been scorned for it,
let me never be afraid to use the word beautiful.
For within is the shining leaf
and the blossoms of the geranium at the window.
And the eyes of the happy puppy as he wakes.
The colors of the old and beloved afghan lying
by itself, on the couch, in the morning sun.
The hummingbird’s nest perched now in a
corner of the bookshelf, in front of so many
books of so many colors.
The two poached eggs. The buttered toast.
The ream of brand-new paper just opened,
white as a block of snow.
The typewriter humming, ready to go.
Tom Dancer’s Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone
You never know
what opportunity
is going to travel to you,
or through you.
Once a friend gave me
a small pine cone—
one of a few
he found in the scat
of a grizzly
in Utah maybe,
or Wyoming.
I took it home
and did what I supposed
he was sure I would do—
I ate it,
thinking
how it had traveled
through that rough
and holy body.
It was crisp and sweet.
It was almost a prayer
without words.
My gratitude
to you, Tom Dancer,
for this gift of the world
I adore so much
and want to belong to.
And thank you too, great bear.
Passing the Unworked Field
Queen Anne’s lace
is hardly
prized but
all the same it isn’t
idle look
how it
stands straight on its
thin stems how it
scrubs its white faces
with the
rags of the sun how it
makes all the
loveliness
it can.
For Example
Okay, the broken gull let me lift it
from the sand.
Let me fumble it into a box, with the
lid open.
Okay, I put the box into my car and started
up the highway
to the place where sometimes, sometimes not,
such things can be mended.
The gull at first was quiet.
How everything turns out one way or another, I
won’t call it good or bad, just
one way or another.
Then the gull lurched from the box and onto
the back of the front seat and
punched me.
Okay, a little blood slid down.
But we all know, don’t we, how sometimes
things have to feel anger, so as not
to be defeated?
I love this world, even in its hard places.
A bird too must love this world,
even in its hard places.
So, even if the effort may come to nothing,
you have to do something.
It was, generally speaking, a perfectly beautiful
summer morning.
The gull beat the air with its good wing.
I kept my eyes on the road.
Percy Wakes Me (Fourteen)
Percy wakes me and I am not ready.
He has slept all night under the covers.
Now he’s eager for action: a walk, then breakfast.
So I hasten up. He is sitting on the kitchen counter
where he is not supposed to be.
How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you
needed me,
to wake me.
He thought he would hear a lecture and deeply
his eyes begin to shine.
He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.
He squirms and squeals; he has done something
that he needed
and now he hears that it is okay.
I scratch his ears, I turn him over
and touch him everywhere. He is
wild with the okayness of it. Then we walk, then
he has breakfast, and he is happy.
This is a poem about Percy.
This is a poem about more than Percy.
Think about it.
Today
Today is a day of
dark clouds and slow rain.
The little blades of corn
are so happy.
Swan
Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air,
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings: a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees,
like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light
of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
Beans Green and Yellow
In fall
it is mushrooms
gathered from dampness
under the pines;
in spring
I have known
the taste of the lamb
full of milk
and spring grass;
today
it is beans green and yellow
and lettuce and basil
from my friends’ garden—
how calmly,
as though it were an ordinary thing,
we eat the blessed earth.
It Is Early
It is early, still the darkest of the dark.
And already I have killed (in exasperation)
two mosquitoes and (inadvertently)
one spider.
All the same, the sun will rise
in its sweeps of pink and red clouds.
Not for me does it rise and not in haste does it rise
but step by step, neither
with exasperation nor inadvertently, and not with
any intended attention to
any one thing, but to all, like a god
that takes its instructions from another, even greater,
whose name, even, we do not know. The one
that made the mosquito, and the spider; the one
that made me as I am: easy to exasperation, then penitent.
How Many Days
How many days I lived and had never used
the holy words.
Tenderly I began them when it came to me
to want to, oh mystery irrefutable!
Then I went out of that place
and into a field and lay down
among the weeds and the grasses,
whispering to them, fast, in order to keep
that world also.
More of the Unfinishable Fox Story
And what did the fox look like?
Like some prince in a fairy tale,
in his secret costume.
What was he looking for?
For a rabbit to fall out of the stars
and into the grass.
Was he combed and curly, did he
wear a prince’s crown?
No, he was rough and smelled of skunk.
But he was beautiful,
and beauty is not to be taken lightly.
Did you stop the car?
No, I kept on going to wherever it was I was going,
which I don’t remember.
Well, what do you remember?
The fox! the fox!
The Riders
When the Pony Express needed
riders, it advertised
a preference for orphans—
that way, no one was likely
to ask questions when the carriers failed
to arrive, or the frightened ponies
stumbled in with their dead
from the flanks of the prairies.
This detail from our country’s past
has no particular significance—it is only
a footnote. There were plenty
of orphans and the point of course
was to get the mail through, so the theory
was sound
. And besides,
think of those rough, lean boys—
how light and hard they would ride
fleeing the great loneliness.
The Poet Dreams of the Classroom
I dreamed
I stood up in class
and I said aloud:
Teacher,
why is algebra important?
Sit down, he said.
Then I dreamed
I stood up
and I said:
Teacher, I’m weary of the turkeys
that we have to draw every fall.
May I draw a fox instead?
Sit down, he said.
Then I dreamed
I stood up once more and said:
Teacher,
my heart is falling asleep
and it wants to wake up.
It needs to be outside.
Sit down, he said.
Dancing in Mexico
Not myself,
but Maria,
who, when her work is done,
tunes in the radio,
goes out into the garden,
picks up the front feet of the little dog Ricky,
and dances. She dances.
The Sweetness of Dogs (Fifteen)
What do you say, Percy? I am thinking
of sitting out on the sand to watch
the moon rise. Full tonight.
So we go
and the moon rises, so beautiful it
makes me shudder, makes me think about
time and space, makes me take
measure of myself: one iota
pondering heaven. Thus we sit,
I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s
perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich
it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,
leans against me and gazes up into
my face. As though I were
his perfect moon.
Bird in the Pepper Tree
Don’t mind my inexplicable delight
