Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

when the darkness opening into morning is more than enough?

As I grew older the things I cared about grew fewer, but were more important.

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.

Will I always, from now on, be this cold? “No, it will diminish. But always it will be with you.”

“Wasn’t your friendship always as beautiful as a flame?”

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

If being so beautiful isn’t enough, what could they possibly say?

Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over he gets to ask it. I get to tell.

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.

I can’t say much more, except that it all happened in silence and peaceful simplicity, and something that felt like the bliss of a certainty and a life lived in accordance with that certainty.

Certainity of faith

And there are days I wish I owned nothing, like the grass.

Joy is not made to be a crumb.

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

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

For which reason the nightmare comes with its painful story and says: you need to know this.

Some memories I would give anything to forget. Others I would not give up upon the point of death, they are the bright hawks of my life.

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

How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.

When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks? And should we not thank the knife also? We do not live in a simple world.

that we receive then we give back.

He has eaten the dark hours

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.

yet nothing appearing on paper half as bright as the mockingbird’s verbal hilarity

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.

The years to come—this is a promise— will grant you ample time to try the difficult steps in the empire of thought where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.

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

Since I see him every morning, I have rewarded myself the pleasure of thinking that he knows me.

But I will not give them the kiss of complicity. I will not give them the responsibility for my life.