123
" ...eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in…
And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
Both intimate and ultimate,
And you will be heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper
Oh let me, for a while longer, enter the two
Beautiful bodies of your lungs...
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for your eyes.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of a single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life- just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
Still another…
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world. "
― Mary Oliver , Evidence: Poems
128
" It is one of the perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not yet acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape - between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety. We need the field from which the lark rises - bird that is more than itself, that is the voice of the universe: vigorous, godly job. Without the physical world such hope it: hacked off. Is: dried up. Without wilderness no fish could leap and flash, no deer could bound soft as eternal waters over the field; no bird could open its wings and become buoyant, adventurous, valorous beyond even the plan of nature. Nor could we. "
― Mary Oliver
135
" The Moths
There's a kind of white moth, I don't know
what kind, that glimmers
by 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. "
― Mary Oliver , New and Selected Poems, Volume One
139
" Spring Azures
In spring the blue azures bow down
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the fields.
Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows--
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking-
don't seem enough te carry me thorugh this world
and I think: how I would like
to have wings-
blue ones-
ribbons of flame.
How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.
And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London- a boy
staring through the window, when God came
fluttering up.
Of course, he screamed,
seeing the bobbin of God's blue body
leaning on the sill,
and the thousand-faceted eyes.
Well, who knows.
Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.
Anyway, Blake the hosier's son stood up
and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city-
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,
to a life of imagination. "
― Mary Oliver
140
" Alligator Poem
I knlet down
at the edge of the water,
and if the white birds standing
in the tops of the trees whistled any warning
I didn't understand,
I drank up to the very moment it came
crashing toward me,
its tail flailing
like a bundle of swords,
slahsing the grass,
and the inside of its cradle-shaped mouth
gaping,
and rimmed with teeth-
and that's how I almost died
of foolishness
in bueatiufl Florida.
But I didn't.
I leaped aside, and fell,
and it streamed past me, crushing everything in its path
as it swept down to the water
and threw itself in,
and, in the end,
this isn't a poem about foolishess
but about how I rose from the ground
and saw the world as if for the second time,
the way it really is.
The water, that circle of shattered galss,
healed itself with a slow whisper
and lay back
with the back-lit light of polished steel,
and the birds, in the endless waterfalls of the trees,
shook open the snowy pleats of their wings, and drifted away,
while, for a keepsake, and to steady myself,
I reached out,
I picked the wild flowers from the grass around me-
blue stars
and blood-red trumpets
on long green stems-
for hours in my trembling hands they glittered
like fire. "
― Mary Oliver , New and Selected Poems, Volume One