Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

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.

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

He wonders, morning after morning, that the river is so cold and fresh and alive, and still I don’t jump in.

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

You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day. You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears. And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through all the traffic, and ambition.

While I sit here in a house filled with books, ideas, doubts, hesitations.

this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away,

So it is if the heart has devoted itself to love, there is not a single inch of emptiness. Gladness gleams all the way to the grave.

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

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.

The only thing I don’t know is, should the activity of this day be called labor, or pleasure?

And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening is the real work.

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?

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

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain.

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.

GOLDFINCHES

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?

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.

“Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha,

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.

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.

so I thought: maybe death isn’t darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us— as soft as feathers— that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes, not without amazement, and let ourselves be carried, as through the translucence of mica, to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow— that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light— in which we are washed and washed out of our bones.

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?

the path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles. It’s in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.

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.

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,

MUSIC LESSONS Sometimes, in the middle of the lesson, we exchanged places. She would gaze a moment at her hands spread over the keys; then the small house with its knick-knacks, its shut windows, its photographs of her sons and the serious husband, vanished as new shapes formed. Sound became music, and music a white scarp for the listener to climb

alone. I leaped rock over rock to the top and found myself waiting, transformed, and still she played, her eyes luminous and willful, her pinned hair falling down— forgetting me, the house, the neat green yard, she fled in that lick of flame all tedious bonds: supper, the duties of flesh and home, the knife at the throat, the death in the metronome.

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

But the crows puff their feathers and cry Between me and the sun, And I should go now. They know me for what I am. No dreamer, No eater of leaves.

BEAVER MOON—THE SUICIDE OF A FRIEND When somewhere life breaks like a pane of glass, and from every direction casual voices are bringing you the news, you say: I should have known. You say: I should have been aware. That last Friday he looked so ill, like an old mountain-climber lost on the white trails, listening to the ice breaking upward, under his worn-out shoes. You say:

I heard rumors of trouble, but after all we all have that. You say: what could I have done? and you go with the rest, to bury him. That night, you turn in your bed to watch the moon rise, and once more see what a small coin it is against the darkness, and how everything else is a mystery, 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.

I too love oblivion why not it is full of second chances.

THE BLACK SNAKE When the black snake flashed onto the morning road, and the truck could not swerve— death, that is how it happens. Now he lies looped and useless as an old bicycle tire. I stop the car and carry him into the bushes. He is as cool and gleaming as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet as a dead brother.

I leave him under the leaves and drive on, thinking about death: its suddenness, its terrible weight, its certain coming. Yet under reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones have always preferred. It is the story of endless good fortune. It says to oblivion: not me! It is the light at the center of every cell. It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward happily all spring through the green leaves before he came to the road.

But the seed has been planted, and when has happiness ever required much evidence to begin its leaf-green breathing?

You light the lamps because You are alone in your small house And the wicks sputtering gold Are like two visitors with good stories