Dream Work

by Mary Oliver

You don’t want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Whatever power of the earth rampages, we turn to it dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever the name of the catastrophe, it is never the opposite of love.

How does any of us live in this world? One thing compensates for another, I suppose. Sometimes what’s wrong does not hurt at all, but rather shines like a new moon. I often think of Beethoven rising, when he couldn’t sleep, stumbling through the dust and crumpled papers, yawning, settling at the piano, inking in rapidly note after note after note.

Later, in the asylum, I began to pick through the red rivers of confusion; I began to take apart the deep stitches of nightmares. This was good, human work. This had nothing to do with laying down a path of words that could throttle, or soften, the human heart.

I forgive them their unhappiness, I forgive them for walking out of the world. But I don’t forgive them for turning their faces away, for taking off their veils and dancing for death — for hurtling toward oblivion on the sharp blades of their exquisite poems, saying: this is the way.

If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more.