OTHER BOOKS BY MARY OLIVER
Dream Work
American Primitive
Twelve Moons
The River Styx, Ohio and Other Poems
No Voyage and Other Poems
CHAPBOOKS
Sleeping in the Forest
The Night Traveler
For
Molly Malone Cook
CONTENTS
SOME QUESTIONS YOU MIGHT ASK
MOCCASIN FLOWERS
THE BUDDHA’S LAST INSTRUCTION
SPRING
SINGAPORE
THE HERMIT CRAB
LILIES
WINGS
THE SWAN
THE KINGFISHER
INDONESIA
“ICH BIN DER WELT ABHANDEN GEKOMMEN”
TURTLE
THE DEER
THE LOON ON OAK-HEAD POND
WHAT IS IT?
WRITING POEMS
SOME HERONS
FIVE A.M. IN THE PINEWOODS
LITTLE OWL WHO LIVES IN THE ORCHARD
THE GIFT
PIPEFISH
THE KOOKABURRAS
THE LILIES BREAK OPEN OVER THE DARK WATER
DEATH AT A GREAT DISTANCE
THE NOTEBOOK
PRAISE
LOOKING FOR SNAKES
FISH BONES
THE OAK TREE AT THE ENTRANCE TO BLACKWATER POND
EVERYTHING
NATURE
SNAKE
THE PONDS
THE SUMMER DAY
SERENGETI
THE TERNS
ROSES, LATE SUMMER
HERONS IN WINTER IN THE FROZEN MARSH
LOOKING AT A BOOK OF VAN GOGH’S PAINTINGS, IN LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
FOXES IN WINTER
HOW TURTLES COME TO SPEND THE WINTER IN THE AQUARIUM, THEN ARE FLOWN SOUTH AND RELEASED BACK INTO THE SEA
CROWS
MAYBE
FINCHES
WHITE OWL FLIES INTO AND OUT OF THE FIELD
SOME QUESTIONS YOU MIGHT ASK
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?
MOCCASIN FLOWERS
All my life,
so far,
I have loved
more than one thing,
including the mossy hooves
of dreams, including
the spongy litter
under the tall trees.
In spring
the moccasin flowers
reach for the crackling
lick of the sun
and burn down. Sometimes,
in the shadows,
I see the hazy eyes,
the lamb-lips
of oblivion,
its deep drowse,
and I can imagine a new nothing
in the universe,
the matted leaves splitting
open, revealing
the black planks
of the stairs.
But all my life—so far—
I have loved best
how the flowers rise
and open, how
the pink lungs of their bodies
enter the fire of the world
and stand there shining
and willing—the one
thing they can do before
they shuffle forward
into the floor of darkness, they
THE BUDDHA’S LAST INSTRUCTION
“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal—a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire—
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
SPRING
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
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.
SINGAPORE
In Singapore, in the airport,
a darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something in the white bowl.
Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.
A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
When the woman tu
rned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.
Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as hubcaps, with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.
I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop and fly down to the river.
This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?
Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.
THE HERMIT CRAB
Once I looked inside
the darkness
of a shell folded like a pastry,
and there was a fancy face—
or almost a face—
it turned away
and frisked up its brawny forearms
so quickly
against the light
and my looking in
gleaming
under the pure white roof
of old calcium.
When I set it down, it hurried
along the tideline
of the sea,
which was slashing along as usual,
shouting and hissing
toward the future,
turning its back
with every tide on the past,
leaving the shore littered
every morning
with more ornaments of death—
what a pearly rubble
from which to choose a house
like a white flower—
and what a rebellion
to leap into it
and hold on,
connecting everything,
the past to the future—
which is of course the miracle—
which is the only argument there is
against the sea.
LILIES
I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.
They rise and fall
in the wedge of the wind,
and have no shelter
from the tongues of the cattle,
and have no closets or cupboards,
and have no legs.
Still I would like to be
as wonderful
as that old idea.
But if I were a lily
I think I would wait all day
for the green face
of the hummingbird
to touch me.
What I mean is,
could I forget myself
even in those feathery fields?
When van Gogh
preached to the poor
of course he wanted to save someone—
most of all himself.
He wasn’t a lily,
and wandering through the bright fields
only gave him more ideas
it would take his life to solve.
I think I will always be lonely
in this world, where the cattle
graze like a black and white river—
where the ravishing lilies
melt, without protest, on their tongues—
where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away.
WINGS
I saw the heron
poise
like a branch of white petals
in the swamp,
in the mud that lies
like a glaze,
in the water
that swirls its pale panels
of reflected clouds;
I saw the heron shaking
its damp wings—
and then I felt
an explosion—
a pain—
also a happiness
I can hardly mention
as I slid free—
as I saw the world
through those yellow eyes—
as I stood like that, rippling,
under the mottled sky
of the evening
that was beginning to throw
its dense shadows.
No! said my heart, and drew back.
But my bones knew something wonderful
about the darkness—
and they thrashed in their cords,
they fought, they wanted
to lie down in that silky mash
of the swamp, the sooner
to fly.
THE SWAN
Across the wide waters
something comes
floating—a slim
and delicate
ship, filled
with white flowers—
and it moves
on its miraculous muscles
as though time didn’t exist,
as though bringing such gifts
to the dry shore
was a happiness
almost beyond bearing.
And now it turns its dark eyes,
it rearranges
the clouds of its wings,
it trails
an elaborate webbed foot,
the color of charcoal.
Soon it will be here.
Oh, what shall I do
when that poppy-colored beak
rests in my hand?
Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:
I miss my husband’s company—
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! the path to heaven
doesn’t lie down in flat miles.
It’s in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,
and the gestures
with which you honor it.
Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those
white wings
touch the shore?
THE KINGFISHER
The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water—hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don’t say he’s right. Neither
do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.
INDONESIA
On the curving, dusty roads
we drove through the plantations
where the pickers balanced on the hot hillsides—
then we clim
bed toward the green trees,
toward the white scarves of the clouds,
to the inn that is never closed
in this island of fairest weather.
The sun hung like a stone,
time dripped away like a steaming river
and from somewhere a dry tongue lashed out
its single motto: now and forever.
And the pickers balanced on the hot hillsides
like gray and blue blossoms,
wrapped in their heavy layers of clothes
against the whips of the branches
in that world of leaves no poor man,
with a brown face and an empty sack,
has ever picked his way out of.
At the inn we stepped from the car
to the garden, where tea
was brought to us scalding in white cups from the fire.
Don’t ask if it was the fire of honey
or the fire of death, don’t ask
if we were determined to live, at last,
with merciful hearts. We sat
among the unforgettable flowers.
We let the white cups cool before
we raised them to our lips.
“ICH BIN DER WELT ABHANDEN GEKOMMEN”
Today is
Gustav Mahler’s
birthday, and
as usual I went out
early into the sea-green
morning where the birds
were singing,
all over but mostly
at the scalloped edges
of the ponds
and in the branches of the trees,
which flared out and down,
like the clothes of our spirits
patiently waiting.
For hours I wandered
over the fields
and the only thing that kept me company
was a song,
it glided along
with my delicious dark happiness,
my heavy,
bristling and aching delight
at the world
which has been like this
forever and forever—
the leaves,
the birds, the ponds,
the loneliness,
and, sometimes,
from a lifetime ago
and another country
such a willing and lilting companion—
a song
made so obviously for me.
At what unknowable cost.
And by a stranger.
TURTLE
Now I see it—
it nudges with its bulldog head
the slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble;
and now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal
who is leading her soft children
from one side of the pond to the other; she keeps
close to the edge
and they follow closely, the good children—
the tender children,