Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what’s wrong with Maybe?

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.

But sometimes, when I’m thinking about you, and no doubt smiling, it sits down quietly, one paw under its chin, and just listens.

I don’t want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. That way, you forget too many important things.

Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy. Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?

don’t worry. I also know the way the old life haunts the new.

A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them.

Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable.

How many kinds of love might there be in the world, and how many formations might they make

We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

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

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

What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen.

I don’t know what God is. I don’t know what death is. But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.

The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.

We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. 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.

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need any more of that sound.

You listen and you know you could live a better life than you do, be softer, kinder. And maybe this year you will be able to do it.

But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding, than this deepest affinity between your eyes and the world.

If you can sing, do it. If not, even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness, like praise, from the pool of shade you have found beneath the everlasting.

Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I? Can’t fly, can’t run, and see how slowly I walk. Well, I think, I can read books.

And whatever that wild cry was it will always remain a mystery you have to go home now and live with, sometimes with the ease of music, and sometimes in silence, for the rest of your life.

My father was a demon of frustrated dreams, was a breaker of trust, was a poor, thin boy with bad luck. He followed God, there being no one else he could talk to; he swaggered before God, there being no one else who would listen.

I mention them now, I will not mention them again. It is not lack of love nor lack of sorrow. But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry. I give them—one, two, three, four—the kiss of courtesy, of sweet thanks, of anger, of good luck in the deep earth. May they sleep well. May they soften. But I will not give them the kiss of complicity. I will not give them the responsibility for my life.

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world. Notice something you have never noticed before,

What secrets fly out of the earth when I push the shovel-edge, when I heave the dirt open? And if there are no secrets what is that smell that sweetness rising?

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?

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

You don’t ever know where a sentence will take you, depending on its roll and fold.

I hope to see everything in this world before I die.

After excitement we are so restful. When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive.

And then the stars stepped forth and held up their appointed fires— those hot, hard watchmen of the night.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Look, I want to love this world as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get to be alive and know it.

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?

If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

I think this is the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?

If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere. And if your spirit carries within it the thorn that is heavier than lead— if it’s all you can do to keep on trudging— there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted— each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning, whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray.

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. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice— though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations— though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. 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.

Listen, whatever it is you try to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body, its spirit longing to fly

I want to live my life all over again, to begin again, to be utterly wild.

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.