Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.

Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.

All I know is that “thank you” should appear somewhere. So, just in case I can’t find the perfect place— “Thank you, thank you.”

So, be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience. Let God and the world know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.

Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Of course I wake up finally thinking, how wonderful to be who I am, made out of earth and water, my own thoughts, my own fingerprints— all that glorious, temporary stuff.

I keep looking I keep wondering standing so far below these high floating birds could this as most things do be offering something for us to think about seriously?

I also know the way the old life haunts the new.

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.

THE INSTANT Today one small snake lay, looped and solitary in the high grass, it swirled to look, didn’t like what it saw and was gone in two pulses forward and with no sound at all, only two taps, in disarray, from that other shy one, my heart.

Now I am here, later I will be there. I will be that small cloud, staring down at the water, the one that stalls, that lifts its white legs, that looks like a lamb.

I can’t say much more, except that it all happened in silence and peaceful simplicity, and something that felt like the bliss of a certainty and a life lived in accordance with that certainty.

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.

And there are days I wish I owned nothing, like the grass.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life?

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed. Little mink, let me watch you. Little mice, run and run. Dear pine cone, let me hold you as you open.

He has no words, still what he tells about his life is clear. He does not own a computer. He imagines the river will last forever. He does not envy the dry house I live in. He does not wonder who or what it is that I worship. He wonders, morning after morning, that the river is so cold and fresh and alive, and still I don’t jump in.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change. Congratulations, if you have changed.

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure— your life— what would do for you?

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know? Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

Among the swans there is none called the least, or the greatest.

Still, friends, consider stone, that is without the fret of gravity, and water that is without anxiety. And the pine trees that never forget their recipe for renewal.

Listen. We all have much more listening to do. Tear the sand away. And listen. The river is singing.

Let me put it this way—if you disdain the cobbler may I assume you walk barefoot?

For myself, I have walked in these woods for more than forty years, and I am the only thing, it seems, that is about to be used up. Or, to be less extravagant, will, in the foreseeable future, be used up.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

I only know that the river kept singing.

the lucky ones: they have such deep natures, they are so happily obedient. While I sit here in a house filled with books, ideas, doubts, hesitations.

Easy and happy they sounded, those two maidens of the wilderness from which we have— who knows to what furious, pitiful extent— banished ourselves.

THE ORCHARD I have dreamed of accomplishment. I have fed ambition. I have traded nights of sleep for a length of work. Lo, and I have discovered how soft bloom turns to green fruit which turns to sweet fruit. Lo, and I have discovered all winds blow cold at last, and the leaves, so pretty, so many, vanish in the great, black packet of time, in the great, black packet of ambition, and the ripeness of the apple is its downfall.

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

“As long as we are able to be extravagant we will be hugely and damply extravagant. Then we will drop foil by foil to the ground. This is our unalterable task, and we do it joyfully.”

We have lived so long in the heaven of touch, and we maintain our mutability, our physicality, even as we begin to apprehend the other world. Slowly we make our appreciative response. Slowly appreciation swells to astonishment. And we enter the dialogue of our lives that is beyond all under- standing or conclusion. It is mystery. It is love of God. It is obedience.

in winter I am as sleepy as any beast in its leafy cave, but in summer there is everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts, the hospitality of the Lord and my inadequate answers as I row my beautiful, temporary body through this water-lily world.

What is this dark hum among the roses?

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

I do not even remember your name, great river, but since that hour I have lived simply, in the joy of the body as full and clear as falling water; the pleasures of the mind like a dark bird dipping in and out, tasting and singing.

Of all the reasons for gladness, what could be foremost of this one, that the mind can seize both the instant and the memory!

I stood awhile and then walked on over the white snow: the terrible, gleaming loneliness. It took me, I suppose, something like six more weeks to reach finally a patch of green, I paused so often to be glad, and grateful, and even then carefully across the vast, deep woods I kept looking back.

Mostly, though, it smelled of milk, and the patience of animals; the give-offs of the body were still in the air, a vague ammonia, not unpleasant.

Nothing lasts. There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is, now. I stood there once, on the green grass, scattering flowers.

For how many years have you gone through the house shutting the windows, while the rain was still five miles away and veering, o plum-colored clouds, to the north, away from you and you did not even know enough to be sorry, you were glad those silver sheets, with the occasional golden staple, were sweeping on, elsewhere, violent and electric and uncontrollable— and will you find yourself finally wanting to forget all enclosures, including the enclosure of yourself, o lonely leaf, and will you dash finally, frantically, to the windows and haul them open and lean out to the dark, silvered sky, to everything that is beyond capture, shouting I’m here, I’m here! Now, now, now, now, now.

“‘Whoever shall be guided so far towards the mysteries of love, by contemplating beautiful things rightly in due order, is approaching the last grade. Suddenly he will behold a beauty marvellous in its nature, that very Beauty, Socrates, for the sake of which all the earlier hardships had been borne: in the first place, everlasting, and never being born nor perishing, neither increasing nor diminishing; secondly, not beautiful here and ugly there, not beautiful now and ugly then, not beautiful in one direction and ugly in another direction, not beautiful in one place and ugly in another place. Again, this beauty will not show itself like a face or hands or any bodily thing at all, nor as a discourse or a science, nor indeed as residing in anything, as in a living creature or in earth or heaven or anything else, but being by itself with itself always in simplicity; while all the beautiful things elsewhere partake of this beauty in such manner, that when they are born and perish it becomes neither less nor more and nothing at all happens to it. . . .’”

Dallgues of Plato

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.

One morning the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident, and didn’t see me—and I thought: so this is the world. I’m not in it. It is beautiful.

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

it’s not size but surge that tells us when we’re in touch with something real,