Devotions, p.18
Devotions, page 18
you see everything
through their eyes,
their joy, their necessity;
you wear their webbed fingers;
your throat swells.
And that’s when you know
you will live whether you will or not,
one way or another,
because everything is everything else,
one long muscle.
It’s no more mysterious than that.
So you relax, you don’t fight it anymore,
the darkness coming down
called water,
called spring,
called the green leaf, called
a woman’s body
as it turns into mud and leaves,
as it beats in its cage of water,
as it turns like a lonely spindle
in the moonlight, as it says
yes.
AUNT LEAF
Needing one, I invented her—
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.
Dear aunt, I’d call into the leaves,
and she’d rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,
and we’d travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker—
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish—
and all day we’d travel.
At day’s end she’d leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back
scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;
or she’d slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;
or she’d hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,
this bone dream,
this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.
FARM COUNTRY
I have sharpened my knives, I have
Put on the heavy apron.
Maybe you think life is chicken soup, served
In blue willow-pattern bowls.
I have put on my boots and opened
The kitchen door and stepped out
Into the sunshine. I have crossed the lawn,
I have entered
The hen house.
THE LAMPS
Eight o’clock, no later,
You light the lamps,
The big one by the large window,
The small one on your desk.
They are not to see by—
It is still twilight out over the sand,
The scrub oaks and cranberries.
Even the small birds have not settled
For sleep yet, out of the reach
Of prowling foxes. No,
You light the lamps because
You are alone in your small house
And the wicks sputtering gold
Are like two visitors with good stories
They will tell slowly, in soft voices,
While the air outside turns quietly
A grainy and luminous blue.
You wish it would never change—
But of course the darkness keeps
Its appointment. Each evening,
An inscrutable presence, it has the final word
Outside every door.
FROM
The River Styx, Ohio
1972
LEARNING ABOUT THE INDIANS
He danced in feathers, with paint across his nose.
Thump, thump went the drum, and bumped our blood,
And sent a strange vibration through the mind.
White Eagle, he was called, or Mr. White,
And he strutted for money now, in schoolrooms built
On Ohio’s plains, surrounded by the graves
Of all of our fathers, but more of his than ours.
Our teachers called it Extracurricular.
We called it fun. And as for Mr. White,
Changed back to a shabby salesman’s suit, he called it
Nothing at all as he packed his drums, and drove,
Tires screeching, out of the schoolyard into the night.
GOING TO WALDEN
It isn’t very far as highways lie.
I might be back by nightfall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!
Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.
NIGHT FLIGHT
Traveling at thirty thousand feet, we see
How much of earth still lies in wilderness,
Till terminals occur like miracles
To civilize the paralyzing dark.
Buckled for landing to a tilting chair,
I think: if miracle or accident
Should send us on across the upper air,
How many miles, or nights, or years to go
Before the mind, with its huge ego paling,
Before the heart, all expectation spent,
Should read the meaning of the scene below?
But now already the loved ones gather
Under the dome of welcome, as we glide
Over the final jutting mountainside,
Across the suburbs tangled in their lights,
And settled softly on the earth once more
Rise in the fierce assumption of our lives—
Discarding smoothly, as we disembark,
All thoughts that held us wiser for a moment
Up there alone, in the impartial dark.
FROM
No Voyage and Other Poems
1963 and 1965
NO VOYAGE
I wake earlier, now that the birds have come
And sing in the unfailing trees.
On a cot by an open window
I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds.
Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?—
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.
For myself, I find my wanting life
Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance;
Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts,
Who still am citizen of this fallen city?
On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember
While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time.
Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can,
Inherit from disaster before I move.
O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.
JACK
The wagons stand
And rust, and glitter sometimes in the moon,
Since we have lost dominion of the fields.
No more great clattering Jack,
His thick mane filled with chaff and wind,
Will let us lead him from the easy barns;
No more sweet gentle Jack
Will let us strap him to his leather bondage
And help us tow the weight of summer home.
The days
Are easier now, and we have time for thought,
Idling in corners of our weedy land.
But now we learn, as season follows season
And no one plants upon these hills,
How poor a gift is freedom to the spirit
That loved the labor. Now, like Jack,
We stand turned out into eternal Sunday,
And look through moonlight at the silenced wagons.
Yet we have lives to balance our regret,
Can turn to other things.
Now in the moonlight we can move away,
While he is left staring upon the stark
Arrangement of the wagons leaning earthward:
The simple blood that cannot name its lack,
But knows the world has fallen out of reason,
That it is autumn, and no laborer comes.
BEYOND THE SNOW BELT
Over the local stations, one by one,
Announcers list disasters like dark poems
That always happen in the skull of winter.
But once again the storm has passed us by:
Lovely and moderate, the snow lies down
While shouting children hurry back to play,
And scarved and smiling citizens once more
Sweep down their easy paths of pride and welcome.
And what else might we do? Let us be truthful.
Two counties north the storm has taken lives.
Two counties north, to us, is far away,—
A land of trees, a wing upon a map,
A wild place never visited,—so we
Forget with ease each far mortality.
Peacefully from our frozen yards we watch
Our children running on the mild white hills.
This is the landscape that we understand,—
And till the principle of things takes root,
How shall examples move us from our calm?
I do not say that it is not a fault.
I only say, except as we have loved,
All news arrives as from a distant land.
THE SWIMMING LESSON
Feeling the icy kick, the endless waves
Reaching around my life, I moved my arms
And coughed, and in the end saw land.
Somebody, I suppose,
Remembering the medieval maxim,
Had tossed me in,
Had wanted me to learn to swim,
Not knowing that none of us, who ever came back
From that long lonely fall and frenzied rising,
Ever learned anything at all
About swimming, but only
How to put off, one by one,
Dreams and pity, love and grace,—
How to survive in any place.
ON WINTER’S MARGIN
On winter’s margin, see the small birds now
With half-forged memories come flocking home
To gardens famous for their charity.
The green globe’s broken; vines like tangled veins
Hang at the entrance to the silent wood.
With half a loaf, I am the prince of crumbs;
By time snow’s down, the birds amassed will sing
Like children for their sire to walk abroad!
But what I love, is the gray stubborn hawk
Who floats alone beyond the frozen vines;
And what I dream of are the patient deer
Who stand on legs like reeds and drink the wind;—
They are what saves the world: who choose to grow
Thin to a starting point beyond this squalor.
THE RETURN
The deed took all my heart.
I did not think of you,
Not till the thing was done.
I put my sword away,
And then no more the cold
And perfect fury ran
Along my narrow bones,
And then no more the black
And dripping corridors
Held anywhere the shape
That I had come to slay.
Then, for the first time,
I saw in the cave’s belly
The dark and clotted webs,
The green and sucking pools,
The rank and crumbling walls,
The maze of passages.
And I thought then
Of the far earth,
Of the spring sun
And the slow wind,
And a young girl.
And I looked then
At the white thread.
Hunting the minotaur
I was no common man
And had no need of love.
I trailed the shining thread
Behind me, for a vow,
And did not think of you.
It lay there, like a sign,
Coiled on the bull’s great hoof
And back into the world.
Half blind with weariness
I touched the thread and wept.
O, it was frail as air.
And I turned then
With the white spool
Through the cold rocks,
Through the black rocks,
Through the long webs,
And the mist fell,
And the webs clung,
And the rocks tumbled,
And the earth shook.
And the thread held.
MORNING IN A NEW LAND
In trees still dripping night some nameless birds
Woke, shook out their arrowy wings, and sang,
Slowly, like finches sifting through a dream.
The pink sun fell, like glass, into the fields.
Two chestnuts, and a dapple gray,
Their shoulders wet with light, their dark hair streaming,
Climbed the hill. The last mist fell away,
And under the trees, beyond time’s brittle drift,
I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made for the permission to reprint the following works:
Poems from Felicity by Mary Oliver (Penguin Press). Copyright © 2015 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.
Poems from Blue Horses by Mary Oliver (Penguin Press). Copyright © 2014 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.
“Benjamin, Who Came From Who Knows Where,” “Bazougey,” and “The Poetry Teacher” from Dog Songs by Mary Oliver (Penguin Press). Copyright © 2013 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.
Devotions is arranged by date of publication, but in the instance of Dog Songs, a volume collecting many earlier poems, it was worth a bit of mischief to allow all the dogs to be together. Poems originally published elsewhere: “The Storm” from Winter Hours, “Percy (One)” and “Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night (Percy Three)” from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two, “Percy (Nine)” from Red Bird, “The Dog Has Run Off Again” from West Wind, “Her Grave” from New and Selected Poems: Volume One, and “The First Time Percy Came Back” from A Thousand Mornings.
Poems from A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver (Penguin Press). Copyright © 2012 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.
Poems from Swan by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2010 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
Poems from Evidence by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2009 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
Poems from The Truro Bear and Other Adventures by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2008 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
Poems from Red Bird (including “Percy (Nine)”) by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2008 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
Poems from Thirst by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2006 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
Poems from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two (including “Percy (One)” and “Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night (Percy Three)”) by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2005 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
Poems from Blue Iris by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2004 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
Poems from Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2004 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
Poems from Long Life: Essays and Other Writings by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2004 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Poems from Owls and Other Fantasies by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2003 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
Poems from What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems by Mary Oliver, copyright © 2002 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Poems from The Leaf and the Cloud: A Poem by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2000 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
“The Storm” from Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1999 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
