We tried to kill him, with sleeping pills, but he only slept for a long time, many hours, then woke with his usual brightness. We decided nature knows best and carried him back to the water and let him go, drifting, but he sank, so we waded out and got hold of him, all of us dripping wet as we carried him back inside.
January passed. As we entered February he ate voraciously, made a hundred messes on well-placed paper towels, or somewhere near them. By that time he knew the routines of the day, and expressed vigorous excitement toward the satisfaction of his anticipation. We had a storm from the southeast and I found along the shore a feast of soft-shelled clams; he ate until his eyes filled with sleep. The broken part of the wing hung now by a single tendon; we clipped it away. One withered foot literally fell from him, along with the first section of leg bone, so he was a one-winged, one-legged gull. But still patient, attentive.
And he had visitors. He liked to have his head touched, his feathers roughed up a little and then smoothed—something a two-legged gull can do for himself. He would sport with his water bowl. He would open the great beak for a feather, then fling it across the floor. He liked applause.
Was he in pain? Our own doctor, who came to see him, did not think so. Did we do right or wrong to lengthen his days? Even now we do not know. Sometimes he was restless. Then I would take him with me into the room where I write, and play music—Schubert, Mahler, Brahms. Soon he would become quiet, and, dipping his head, would retire into the private chamber of himself.
But the rough-and-tumble work of dying was going on, even in the quiet body. The middle of February passed. When I picked him up the muscles along the breast were so thin I feared for the tender skin lying across the crest of the bone. And still the eyes were full of the spices of amusement.
He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not fact, this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.
But the day we knew must come did at last, and then the non-responsiveness of his eyes was terrible. It was late February when I came downstairs, as usual, before dawn. Then returned upstairs, to M. The sweep and play of the morning was just beginning, its tender colors reaching everywhere. “The little gull has died,” I said to M., as I lifted the shades to the morning light.
Wrens
here I go
into the wide gardens of
wastefields blue glass clear glass
and other rubbishes blinking from the
dust from the fox tracks among the
roots and risings of
buttercups joe pye honey
suckle the queen’s
lace and her
blue sailors
the little wrens
have carried a hundred sticks into
an old rusted pail and now they are
singing in the curtains of leaves they are
fluttering down to the bog they are dipping
their darling heads down to wet
their whistles how happy they are to be
diligent at last
foolish birds
Some Herons
A blue preacher
flew toward the swamp,
in slow motion.
On the leafy banks,
an old Chinese poet,
hunched in the white gown of his wings,
was waiting.
The water
was the kind of dark silk
that has silver lines
shot through it
when it is touched by the wind
or is splashed upward,
in a small, quick flower,
by the life beneath it.
The preacher
made his difficult landing,
his skirts up around his knees.
The poet’s eyes
flared, just as a poet’s eyes
are said to do
when the poet is awakened
from the forest of meditation.
It was summer.
It was only a few moments past the sun’s rising,
which meant that the whole long sweet day
lay before them.
They greeted each other,
rumpling their gowns for an instant,
and then smoothing them.
They entered the water,
and instantly two more herons—
equally as beautiful—
joined them and stood just beneath them
in the black, polished water
where they fished, all day.
September
I walk through a grove of pines and startle the nighthawk from the limb where it has been lying, resting or sleeping. The bird is similar in color to the gray limb, and lies along not across it, so is almost invisible. On its hawk-like wings it rises into the sky, and vanishes.
The nighthawk doesn’t nest here but only stops a few days on its long travels. I know this one must be tired of flight, and I am sorry to have disturbed it.
The next day, walking the same woods, I approach with care. The bird is again resting on the limb, its eyes shut. I back away and do not disturb it.
The following year, almost to the day, I enter the pinewoods and remember the nighthawk just in time—in time to be cautious and silent. And the bird is there, in the same tree, on the same limb, in the pinewoods that is so pretty and so restful, apparently, to both of us.
Crow
Every morning
steps
along the beach
as though he found the world
brand-new,
and wonderful,
and, without a doubt,
made especially for him.
The eiders stare,
the black ducks are busy
with their own affairs
as he marches
along the wrack line
on his sturdy feet
to the bounty of stranded sea worms,
crabs,
abandoned bags of popcorn—
“oh yes,” his big black beak seems to say,
“this is good,
here is breakfast and lunch both,
and as for dinner,
I’ll be back.
What a good world!”
I wish we could be friends,
but when he sees me
daring to look at him
he opens his strong arms
that are dressed, always, in the darkest ribbons,
and floats off—
but only a little way
and he’s down again on the sandy track—
and who has seen yet anything cleaner,
bolder,
more gleaming, more certain of its philosophy
than the eye he turns back?
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
Coming down
out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel,
or a buddha with wings,
it was beautiful
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings—
five feet apart—and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys
of the snow—
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes,
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows—
so I thought:
maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us—
as soft as feathers—
that
we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,
not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow—
that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light—
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.
Starlings in Winter
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
I Looked Up
I looked up and there it was
among the green branches of the pitchpines—
thick bird,
a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders and down the back—
color of copper, iron, bronze—
lighting up the dark branches of the pine.
What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
When I made a little sound
it looked at me, then it looked past me.
Then it rose, the wings enormous and opulent,
and, as I said, wreathed in fire.
Long Afternoon at the
Edge of Little Sister Pond
As for life,
I’m humbled,
I’m without words
sufficient to say
how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over,
and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched
though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen—
a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of holiness.
Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort—
along with human love,
dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about
stopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,
and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.
As for death,
I can’t wait to be the hummingbird,
can you?
AFTERWORD
Backyard
I had no time to haul out all
the dead stuff so it hung, limp
or dry, wherever the wind swung it
over or down or across. All summer
it stayed that way, untrimmed, and
thickened. The paths grew
damp and uncomfortable and mossy until
nobody could get through but a mouse or a
shadow. Blackberries, ferns, leaves, litter
totally without direction management
supervision. The birds loved it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Wild Geese” comes from Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.
“June,” “Yes! No!,” “Hummingbirds,” “Wrens,” “September” and “I Looked Up” are from White Pine, Harcourt, 1991.
The essay “Owls” is from Blue Pastures, Harcourt, 1995. It originally appeared in Orion and was reprinted in The Best American Essays 1996, Robert Atwan, series editor.
“The Swan,” “The Kingfisher,” “Herons in Winter in the Frozen Marsh,” “The Kookaburras,” “The Loon on Oak-Head Pond,” “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard,” “Some Herons,” and “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field” are from House of Light, Beacon Press, 1990.
“White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field” appeared originally in The New Yorker.
“Hawk” is from New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, 1992.
THE FOLLOWING TITLES HAVE APPEARED IN PERIODICALS:
“Backyard” and “Bird,” Appalachia
“Spring,” Onearth
“The Dipper” and “Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond,” Shenandoah
“Catbird,” The Southern Review
“Goldfinches,” Spirituality and Health
“While I Am Writing a Poem to Celebrate Summer, the Meadowlark Begins to Sing,” Spiritus
My thanks to all editors and permissions coordinators.
Beacon Press
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Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
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are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 2003 by Mary Oliver
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oliver, Mary
Owls and other fantasies / Mary Oliver.
p.cm.
ISBN 978-0-8070-9682-6 (pbk.: acid-free paper)
eISBN 978-0-8070-9682-6
1. Birds—Poetry. I. Title.
ps 3565.l5o95 2003
811’.54—dc21
2003013336