Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

I wouldn’t mind being a rose in a field full of roses. Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition. Reason they have not yet thought of. Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what. Or any other foolish question.

If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do— determined to save the only life you could save.

cramming the black honey of summer into my mouth; all day my body accepts what it is.

What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

I want to flow out across the mother of all waters, I want to lose myself on the black and silky currents, yawning, gathering the tall lilies of sleep.

One day in summer when everything has already been more than enough the wild beds start exploding open along the berm of the sea;

there’s a sickness worse than the risk of death and that’s forgetting what we should never forget.

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

The dream of my life Is to lie down by a slow river And stare at the light in the trees— To learn something by being nothing A little while but the rich Lens of attention.

and you know nothing at all except the moonlight is beautiful— white rivers running together along the bare boughs of the trees— and somewhere, for someone, life is becoming moment by moment unbearable.

and when has happiness ever required much evidence to begin its leaf-green breathing?

A grainy and luminous blue. You wish it would never change— But of course the darkness keeps Its appointment. Each evening,

They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper: How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

But in a book I read and cherish, Going to Walden is not so easy a thing As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

And under the trees, beyond time’s brittle drift, I stood like Adam in his lonely garden On that first morning, shaken out of sleep, Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves, Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.