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.

look the sunlight and the shadows are chasing each other listen how the wind swirls and leaps and dives up and down who am I to summon his hard and happy body his four white feet that love to wheel and pedal through the dark leaves to come back to walk by my side, obedient.

Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though sheets of water flowed over them though it is only wind, that common thing, free to everyone, and everything?

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.

Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment, or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other than mine in the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table? Have I ever taken good fortune for granted?

in the long blades of the grass but now look death too is a carpenter how all his helpers the shining ants

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 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?

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.

light of the world, hold me.

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

When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistakable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming—then row, row for your life toward it.

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.

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.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?