West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

by Mary Oliver

Some persons of a scientific turn were once discoursing pompously and, to him, distastefully, about the incredible distance of the planets, the length of time light takes to travel to the earth, &c., when he burst out,” ’Tis false! I was walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I touched the sky with my stick.” —Life and Works of William Blake, A. Gilchrist

Blake said Whitman said such wisdom in the agitated motions of the mind

look down with your golden eyes how everything trembles then settles from mere incidence into the lush of meaning.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another—why don’t you get going?

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly at the top of the field, her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine, has not already done?

Here is an amazement—once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next. I bow down.

Have I not been ready always at the iron door, not knowing to what country it opens—to death or to more life?

Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold or the night too long and as black as oil anyway, or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely of the second-rate, less than happiness as I stepped down from the porch and set out along the green paths of the world?

in the long blades of the grass but now look death too is a carpenter how all his helpers the shining ants labor the tiny knives of their mouths dipping and slashing how they hurry in and out of that looped body taking apart opening up now the soul flashes like a star and is gone there is only that soft dark building death.

Then the wind fluttered its wrists, a sweet music as usual, though as usual I could not tell whether it was about caring or not caring that it tossed itself around, in the boughs of light, and sang.

how I meant to live a quiet life how I meant to live a life of mildness and meditation tapping the careful words against each other and I thought— as though I were suddenly spinning, like a bar of silver as though I had shaken my arms and lo! they were wings— of the Buddha when he rose from his green garden when he rose in his powerful ivory body when he turned to the long dusty road without end when he covered his hair with ribbons and the petals of flowers when he opened his hands to the world.

Once, deep in the woods, I found the white skull of a bear and it was utterly silent— and once a river otter, in a steel trap, and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?

And have you made inquiry yet as to what the poetry of this world is about? For what purpose do we seek it, and ponder it, and give it such value?

For this is my skill—I am capable of pondering the most detailed knowledge, and the most fastened-up, impenetrable mystery, at the same time.

Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.

Beauty can die all right— but don’t you worry, from utter darkness— since opposites are, finally, the same—

If you think daylight is just daylight then it is just daylight.

At the edge of sweet sanity open such wild, blind wings.

There are days when I rise from my desk desolate. There are days when the field water and the slender grasses and the wild hawks have it all over the rest of us whether or not they make clear sense, ride the beautiful long spine of grammar, whether or not they rhyme.

There are night birds, in the garden below us, singing. Oh, listen! For a moment I thought it was our own bodies.

And what did you think love would be like? A summer day? The brambles in their places, and the long stretches of mud? Flowers in every field, in every garden, with their soft beaks and their pastel shoulders? On one street after another, the litter ticks in the gutter. In one room after another, the lovers meet, quarrel, sicken, break apart, cry out. One or two leap from windows. Most simply lean, exhausted, their thin arms on the sill. They have done all that they could. The golden eagle, that lives not far from here, has perhaps a thousand tiny feathers flowing from the back of its head, each one shaped like an infinitely small but perfect spear.

Now only the humorous shadows that the moon makes, playing the corners of furniture, flung and dropped clothing, the backs of books, the architecture of electronics, and so on. The bed that level and soft rise is empty. We are gone.

I pick up a pencil, I put it down, I pick it up again. I am thinking of you. I am always thinking of you.

Do you think this world is only an entertainment for you?

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually? Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left— fields everywhere invite you into them. And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.

A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming next is coming with its own heave and grace.