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by
Mary Oliver
Read between
September 12 - October 12, 2022
I also know the enclosure of my skills, and am no less pert than he when some flow takes me over the edge of it.
Whatever a house is to the heart and body of man—refuge, comfort, luxury—surely it is as much or more to the spirit.
You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.
Emerging wet from the glittering caves of the pond, she travels in a coat of glass and dust.
Of appetite—of my own appetite—I recognize this: it flashes up, quicker than thought; it cannot be exiled; it can be held on leash, but only barely.
I am no fool, no sentimentalist. I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same.
Were they seed eaters? Were they meat eaters? Not the point. They were dreamers, and imaginers, and declarers; they lived looking and looking and looking, seeing the apparent and beyond the apparent, wondering, allowing for uncertainty, also grace, easygoing here, ferociously unmovable there; they were thoughtful.
All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself.
feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building. My poems have all been written—if not finished at least started—somewhere out-of-doors: in the fields, on the shore, under the sky.
He must unstring the universe to its farthest planet and star, and restring it in another way.
We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen.
There are as many worlds as there are imaginers.