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.

Sometimes I want to use small words and make them important and it starts shouting the dictionary, the opportunities.

Each of us wears a shadow. But just now it is summer again and I am watching the lilies bow to each other, then slide on the wind and the tug of desire, close, close to one another. Soon now, I’ll turn and start for home. And who knows, maybe I’ll be singing.

I HAVE JUST SAID I have just said something ridiculous to you and in response, your glorious laughter. These are the days the sun is swimming back to the east and the light on the water gleams as never, it seems, before. I can’t remember every spring, I can’t remember everything— so many years! Are the morning kisses the sweetest or the evenings or the inbetweens? 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.”

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? Listen to me or not, it hardly matters. I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish. I’m just chattering.

it is simply one of those gorgeous things that was made to do what it does perfectly and to last, as almost nothing does, almost forever.

I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.

He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, I don’t know why. And yet, why not.

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was taught, and if not, how shall I correct it? Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, can I do better?

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.

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.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

How many kinds of love might there be in the world, and how many formations might they make and who am I ever to imagine I could know such a marvelous business?

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

you sit now very quietly in some lovely wild place, and listen to the silence. And I say that this, too, is a poem.

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

And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.

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.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

believe us, they say, it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world. I beg of you,

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 I could not tell which fit me more comfortably, the power, or the powerlessness; neither would have me entirely;

I think there isn’t anything in this world I don’t admire. If there is, I don’t know what it is. I haven’t met it yet. Nor expect to.

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 are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything?

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

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. Nor am I talking about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant— but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the daily

Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it.

I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us as with a match which is lit, and bright, but does not hurt in the common way, but delightfully, as if delight were the most serious thing you ever felt.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.

and I rise from the comfortable bed and go to another room, where my books are lined up in their neat and colorful rows. How magical they are! I choose one and open it. Soon I have wandered in over the waves of the words to the temple of thought.

I do not close the book. Neither, for a long while, do I read on.

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.

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.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.

And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening is the real work. Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.

Do you have a question that can’t be answered? Do the stars frighten you by their heaviness and their endless number? Does it bother you, that mercy is so difficult to understand? For some souls it’s easy; they lie down on the sand and are soon asleep. For others, the mind shivers in its glacial palace, and won’t come.

Eternity is not later, or in any unfindable place.

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

Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment, or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other than mine in the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table? Have I ever taken good fortune for granted?

If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me? Even then? Since we’re bound to be something, why not together.

We did not know she was sick, but she has come to the fence, walking like a woman who is balancing a sword inside of her body,

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 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.

And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead children out of the fields into the text of civility to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

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.