West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

by Mary Oliver

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.

Above the modest house and the palace—the same darkness. Above the evil man and the just, the same stars. Above the child who will recover and the child who will not recover, the same energies roll forward, 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?

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.

I believe in death. I believe it is the last wonderful work.

Beauty is my work, but not my only work—

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

Believe me these are not just words talking. This is my life, thinking of the darkness to follow.

I am stopped as the world comes back wet and beautiful I am thinking that language is not even a river is not a tree is not a green field is not even a black ant traveling briskly modestly from day to day from one golden page to another.

Of course it was alive. This was the quick wrist of early summer, when everything was alive.

and the whelks, ribbed or with ivory knobs, but so knocked about in the sea’s blue hands that their story is at length only about the wholeness of destruction—

though the hour be whole though the minute be deep and rich though the heart be a singer of hot red songs and the mind be as lightning, what all the music will come to is nothing, only the sheets of fog and the fog’s blue bell— you do not believe it now, you are not supposed to.

Rain, Tree, Thunder and Lightning

listen, passion did it, called me forth, addled me, stripped me clean then covered me with the cloth of happiness—

or the dark floss of the earth itself, heavy and electric. 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.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come. Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine. Let the wind turn in the trees, and the mystery hidden in dirt swing through the air. How could I look at anything in this world and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart? What should I fear?

Since we’re bound to be something, why not together.

And the speck of my heart, in my shed of flesh and bone, began to sing out, the way the sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a mouth and a tongue, if the sky had a throat, if god wasn’t just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up. Where am I? Even the rough words come to me now, quick as thistles. Who made your tyrant’s body, your thirst, your delving, your gladness? Oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire! Get away from me. Come closer.

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

I love this poet, which means nothing here or there, but is like a garden in my heart.

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.

The ocean breathes in its silver jacket.

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

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?

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw, nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the present hour, to the song falling out of the mockingbird’s pink mouth, to the tiplets of the honeysuckle, that have opened in the night.

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.

That was then, which hasn’t ended yet.