Mary Oliver
Poems
Spring by Mary Oliver
Somewhere a black bear has just risen
from sleep and is staring
Down the mountain
All night
In the brisk and shallow restlesssness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her -—her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
Knife
Something just now
moved through my heart
like the thinnest of blades
as that red-tail pumped once
with its great wings
and flew above the gray, cracked rock wall.
It wasn't about the bird,
it was something about the way
stone stays mute and put,
whatever goes flashing by.
Sometimes, when I sit like this,
quiet, all the dreams of my blood
and all outrageous divisions of time
seem ready to leave,
to slide out of me.
Then, I imagine, I would never move.
By now the hawk has flown five miles at least,
dazzling whoever else has happened to look up.
I was dazzled.
But that wasn't the knife.
It was the sheer, dense wall of blind stone
without a pinch of hope
or a single unfulfilled desire
sponging up and reflecting,
so brilliantly,
as it has for centuries,
the sun's fire.
Peonies
This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers
and they open
--- pools of lace, white and pink ---
and all day the black ants climb over them,
boring their deep and mysterious holes into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away to their dark, underground cities ---
and all day under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,
the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air, and rise,
their red stems holding all that dampness and
recklessness gladly and lightly,
and there it is again --- beauty the brave,
the exemplary, blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass,
with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot,
into the garden, and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness,
their lush trembling,
their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment,
before they are nothing, forever?
The Journey
One day you finally knewwhat 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 tugat 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.
