Why I Wake Early

by Mary Oliver

I believe I will never quite know. Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale-pink morning light.

So I put them in the sink, for the cool porcelain was tender, and took out the tattered and cut each stem on a slant, trimmed the black and raggy leaves, and set them all— roses, delphiniums, daisies, iris, lilies, and more whose names I don’t know, in bright new water— gave them a bounce upward at the end to let them take their own choice of position, the wheels, the spurs, the little sheds of the buds. It took, to do this, perhaps fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of music with nothing playing.

There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God. And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

Then I remember: death comes before the rolling away of the stone.

Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

Let us hope it will always be like this, each of us going on in our inexplicable ways building the universe.