Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

I DON’T WANT TO BE DEMURE

DON’T HESITATE 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.

PRAYER May I never not be frisky, May I never not be risqué. May my ashes, when you have them, friend, and give them to the ocean, leap in the froth of the waves, still loving movement, still ready, beyond all else, to dance for the world.

Oh do you have time to linger

OF THE EMPIRE 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.

What if the stars began to shout their names, or to run this way and that way above the clouds? What if you painted a picture of a tree, and the leaves began to rustle, and a bird cheerfully sang from its painted branches? What if you suddenly saw that the silver of water was brighter than the silver of money? What if you finally saw that the sunflowers, turning toward the sun all day and every day—who knows how, but they do it—were more precious, more meaningful than gold?

It is what I was born for— to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world— to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation.

If you were there, it was all those things. If you can imagine it, it is all those things.

the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.

Softest of mornings, hello. And what will you do today, I wonder, to my heart?

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

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. Listen, this was his life. I bury it in the earth. I sweep the closets. I leave the house.

Therefore, tell me: what will engage you? What will open the dark fields of your mind, like a lover at first touching?

maybe just looking and listening is the real work. Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.

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—

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

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.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her— her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.

light— in which we are washed and washed out of our bones.

think this is the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind a little dying,

This is not a poem about a dream, though it could be. This is a poem about the world that is ours, or could be.

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.

SLEEPING IN THE FOREST I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. 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

All night—and all your life, if you are willing— It will nuzzle your face, cold-nosed, Like a small white wolf; It will curl in your palm

And should anyone be surprised if sometimes, when the white moon rises, women want to lash out with a cutting edge?