West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

by Mary Oliver

and you can’t keep me from the woods, from the tonnage of their shoulders, and their shining green hair. Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another—why don’t you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. 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?

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.

There was only this— an idea. Beauty can die all right— but don’t you worry, from utter darkness— since opposites are, finally, the same— comes light’s snowy field.

And, as for eternity, what’s that but the collation of all the hours

we have known of sweetness a...

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.

Keep lo...

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. You do not believe it yet—but you will— morning by singular morning, and shell by broken shell.

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.

You there, puddled in lamplight at your midnight desk—

you there, rewriting nature so anyone can understand it— what will you say about the roses— their sighing, their tossing— and the want of the heart, and the trill of the heart, and the burning mouth of the wind?

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.

There was not a single night when it did not find, sooner or later, a sweet crumb, and a small plump seed of some sort between the floorboards. Thus, it got used to hope. It revised altogether its idea of what the world was like, and of what was going to happen next, or, even, eventually. It thought: how sufficient are these empty rooms! It thought: here I am still, in my black suit, warm and content—and drew a little music from its dark thighs. As though the twilight underneath the refrigerator were the world. As though the winter would never come.

It is midnight, or almost. Out in the world the wind stretches bundles back into itself like a hundred bolts of lace then stretches again flows itself over the windowsill and into the room it scatters the papers from the desk it is in love with disorganization

in my room after such disturbance I sit, smiling. 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.

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint that something is missing from your life! 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? Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

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.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters, caution and prudence? Fall in! Fall in!

I climb. I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.