FOXES IN WINTER
Every night in the moonlight the foxes come down the hill
to gnaw on the bones of birds. I never said
nature wasn’t cruel. Once, in a city as hot as these woods
are cold, I met a boy with a broken face. To stay
alive, he was a beggar. Also, in the night, a thief.
And there are birds in his country that look like rainbows—
if he could have caught them, he would have
torn off their feathers and put their bodies into
his own. The foxes are hungry, who could blame them
for what they do? I never said
we weren’t sunk in glittering nature, until we are able
to become something else. As for the boy, it’s simple.
He had nothing, not even a bird. All night the pines
are so cold their branches crack. All night the snow falls
softly down. Then it shines like a field
of white flowers. Then it tightens.
HOW TURTLES COME TO SPEND THE WINTER IN THE AQUARIUM, THEN ARE FLOWN SOUTH AND RELEASED BACK INTO THE SEA
Somewhere down beach, in the morning, at water’s edge, I found a sea turtle,
its huge head a smoldering apricot, its shell streaming with seaweed,
its eyes closed, its flippers motionless.
When I bent down, it moved a little.
When I picked it up, it sighed.
Was it forty pounds, or fifty pounds, or a hundred?
Was it two miles back to the car?
We walked a little while, and then we rested, and then we walked on.
I walked with my mouth open, my heart roared.
The eyes opened, I don’t know what they thought.
Sometimes the flippers swam at the air.
Sometimes the eyes closed.
I couldn’t walk anymore, and then I walked some more
while it turned into granite, or cement, but with that apricot-colored head,
that stillness, that Buddha-like patience, that cold-shocked but slowly beating heart.
Finally, we reached the car.
The afternoon is the other part of this story.
Have you ever found something beautiful, and maybe just in time?
How such a challenge can fill you!
Jesus could walk over the water.
I had to walk ankle-deep in the sand, and I did it.
My bones didn’t quite snap.
Come on in, and see me smile.
I probably won’t stop for hours.
Already, in the warmth, the turtle has raised its head, is looking around.
Today, who could deny it, I am an important person.
CROWS
It is January, and there are the crows
like black flowers on the snow.
While I watch they rise and float toward the frozen pond, they have seen
some streak of death on the dark ice.
They gather around it and consume everything, the strings
and the red music of that nameless body. Then they shout,
one hungry, blunt voice echoing another.
It begins to rain.
Later, it becomes February,
and even later, spring
returns, a chorus of thousands.
They bow, and begin their important music.
I recognize the oriole.
I recognize the thrush, and the mockingbird.
I recognize the business of summer, which is to forge ahead, delicately.
So I dip my fingers among the green stems, delicately.
I lounge at the edge of the leafing pond, delicately.
I scarcely remember the crust of the snow.
I scarcely remember the icy dawns and the sun like a lamp without a fuse.
I don’t remember the fury of loneliness.
I never felt the wind’s drift.
I never heard of the struggle between anything and nothing.
I never saw the flapping, blood-gulping crows.
MAYBE
Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,
silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night.
But you know how it is
when something
different crosses
the threshold—the uncles
mutter together,
the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.
It comes and goes
like the wind over the water—
sometimes, for days,
you don’t think of it.
Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth
like a tremor of pure sunlight,
before exhaustion,
gripped their bones and left them
miserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it—
tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was—
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer sea.
FINCHES
Ice in the woods, snow in the fields, a few finches singing.
I look up in time to see their raspberry-colored faces
and the black tears on their breasts.
Of course, they are just trying to stay alive
like the frozen river and the crows.
But who would guess that, the way they dangle the bright
necklaces of their music
from the tops of the trees?
Before nightfall, they’d better find where the last sprays of seeds have fallen,
they’d better find shelter from the wind.
And there they go, tiny rosettes of energy,
as though nothing in this world was frightening—
as though the only thing that mattered was to praise the world sufficiently—
as though they were only looking, light-heartedly, for the next tree in which to sing;
and here I am, at home again, out of the snowy fields, where I will
take off my jacket, and sit down at the table, and go over
my verses again.
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 wh
ich we are washed and washed
out of our bones.
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 1990 by Mary Oliver
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 21 20
Text design by Dede Cummings
My thanks to the editors of the following magazines, in which some of these poems previously appeared:
Amicus (Spring, The Pipefish, The Swan, Five A.M. in the Pinewoods); Antaeus (Nature); The Atlantic (Lilies, Writing Poems, Moccasin Flowers, The Loon on Oak-Head Pond); Country Journal (The Deer, The Gift, Wings, The Notebook, Herons in Winter in the Frozen Marsh, How Turtles Come to Spend the Winter in the Aquarium …, Finches, Turtle); Harvard Magazine (Some Questions You Might Ask); Kenyon Review (Fish Bones, Indonesia, The Terns); Ohio Review (Crows); Partisan Review (Everything); Ploughshares (Maybe, Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard); Poetry (The Hermit Crab, The Kingfisher, Singapore, Death at a Great Distance, Snake, What Is It?); Sycamore Review (The Kookaburras); Virginia Quarterly Review (The Buddha’s Last Instruction, The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water); Western Humanities Review (Praise, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”); Wigwag (The Summer Day, Some Herons); Wilderness (The Ponds). White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field originally appeared in The New Yorker.
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oliver, Mary
House of light / Mary Oliver.
p. cm.
e-ISBN 978-0-8070-9539-3
ISBN 978-0-8070-6811-3 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3565.L5H68. 1990
811'.54—dc20 89-46059