OTHER BOOKS BY MARY OLIVER
POETRY
No Voyage and Other Poems
The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems
Twelve Moons
American Primitive
Dream Work
House of Light
New and Selected Poems Volume One
White Pine
West Wind
The Leaf and the Cloud
What Do We Know
Owls and Other Fantasies
Why I Wake Early
Blue Iris
New and Selected Poems Volume Two
Thirst
Red Bird
CHAPBOOKS AND SPECIAL EDITIONS
The Night Traveler
Sleeping in the Forest
Provincetown
Wild Geese (UK Edition)
PROSE
A Poetry Handbook
Blue Pastures
Rules for the Dance
Winter Hours
Long Life
Our World (with photographs by Molly Malone Cook)
CONTENTS
The Chance to Love Everything
The Gesture
Porcupine
Toad
One Hundred White-sided Dolphins on a Summer Day
The Kitten
Ghosts
Carrying the Snake to the Garden
The Opossum
This Is the One
At Herring Cove
Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered
Turtle
The Other Kingdoms
Swimming with Otter
Black Snake
Five A.M. in the Pinewoods
Humpbacks
Moles
The Snow Cricket
Whelks
A Meeting
The Gift
The Truro Bear
Alligator Poem
The Hermit Crab
Hannah’s Children
Pipefish
This Too
Swoon
How Turtles Come to Spend the Winter in the Aquarium, Then Are Flown South and Released Back Into the Sea
The Poet Goes to Indiana
The Summer Day
Mink
Percy (One)
Percy (Two)
Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night (Three)
Percy (Four)
News of Percy (Five)
Percy (Six)
Percy (Seven)
Percy and Books (Eight)
Percy (Nine)
I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life (Ten)
Percy at His Bath, or, Ambivalence (Eleven)
Percy at Breakfast (Twelve)
Percy Speaks While I Am Doing Taxes (Thirteen)
Truth is always veiled in a certain mystery.
Fabre, The Life of the Fly
On thy wondrous works I will meditate.
Psalm 145
The Chance to Love Everything
All summer I made friends
with the creatures nearby—
they flowed through the fields
and under the tent walls,
or padded through the door,
grinning through their many teeth,
looking for seeds,
suet, sugar; muttering and humming,
opening the breadbox, happiest when
there was milk and music. But once
in the night I heard a sound
outside the door, the canvas
bulged slightly—something
was pressing inward at eye level.
I watched, trembling, sure I had heard
the click of claws, the smack of lips
outside my gauzy house—
I imagined the red eyes,
the broad tongue, the enormous lap.
Would it be friendly too?
Fear defeated me. And yet,
not in faith and not in madness
but with the courage I thought
my dream deserved,
I stepped outside. It was gone.
Then I whirled at the sound of some
shambling tonnage.
Did I see a black haunch slipping
back through the trees? Did I see
the moonlight shining on it?
Did I actually reach out my arms
toward it, toward paradise falling, like
the fading of the dearest, wildest hope—
the dark heart of the story that is all
the reason for its telling?
The Gesture
On the dog’s ear, a scrap of filmy stuff
turns out to be
a walking stick, that jade insect, this one scarcely sprung
from the pod of the nest,
not an inch long. I could just see
the eyes, elbows, feet nimble under the long shanks.
I could not imagine it could live
in the brisk world, or where it would live, or how. But
I took it
outside and held it up to the red oak that rises
ninety feet into the air, and it lifted its forward-most
pair of arms
with what in anything worth thinking about would have seemed
a graceful and glad gesture; it caught
onto the bark, it hung on; it rested; it began to climb.
Porcupine
Where
the porcupine is
I don’t
know but I hope
almost done
to himself.
For years I have wanted to see
that slow rambler,
it’s high
up on some pine
bough in some
thick tree, maybe
that thornbush.
I think, what love does to us
is a Gordian knot,
it’s that complicated.
on the other side
of the swamp.
The dogs have come
running back, one of them
I hug the dogs
and their good luck,
and put on their leashes.
So dazzling she must be—
with a single quill
in his moist nose.
He’s laughing,
not knowing what he has
a plump, dark lady
wearing a gown of nails—
white teeth tearing skin
from the thick tree.
Toad
I was walking by. He was sitting there.
It was full morning, so the heat was heavy on his sand-colored head and his webbed feet. I squatted beside him, at the edge of the path. He didn’t move.
I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time. The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night. About this cup we call a life. About happiness. And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.
He looked neither up nor down, which didn’t necessarily mean he was either afraid or asleep. I felt his energy, stored under his tongue perhaps, and behind his bulging eyes.
I talked about how the world seems to me, five feet tall, the blue sky all around my head. I said, I wondered how it seemed to him, down there, intimate with the dust.
He might have been Buddha—did not move, blink, or frown, not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes as the refined anguish of language passed over him.
One Hundred White-sided Dolphins on a Summer Day
1.
Fat,
black, slick,
galloping in the pitch
of the waves, in the pearly
fields of the sea,
they leap toward us,
they rise, sparkling, and vanish, and
rise sparkling,
they breathe little clouds of mist, they lift perpetual smiles,
they slap their tails on the waves, grandmothers and grandfathers
enjoying the old jokes,
they circle around us,
they swim with us—
2.
a hundred white-sided dolphins
on a summer day,
each one, as God himself
could not appear more acceptable
a hundred times,
in a body blue and black threading through
the sea foam,
and lifting himself up from the opened
tents of the waves on his fishtail,
to look
with the moon of his eye
into my heart,
3.
and find there
pure, sudden, steep, sharp, painful
gratitude
that falls—
I don’t know—either
unbearable tons
of salvation
on my neck,
lifting me
from the boat’s plain plank seat
into the world’s
4.
unspeakable kindness.
It is my sixty-third summer on earth
and, for a moment, I have almost vanished
into the body of the dolphin,
into the moon-eye of God,
into the white fan that lies at the bottom of the sea
with everything
that ever was, or ever will be,
supple, wild, rising on flank or fishtail—
singing or whistling or breathing damply through blowhole
at top of head. Then, in our little boat, the dolphins suddenly gone,
we sailed on through the brisk, cheerful day.
The Kitten
More amazed than anything
I took the perfectly black
stillborn kitten
with the one large eye
in the center of its small forehead
from the house cat’s bed
and buried it in a field
behind the house.
I suppose I could have given it
to a museum,
I could have called the local
newspaper.
But instead I took it out into the field
and opened the earth
and put it back
saying, it was real,
saying, life is infinitely inventive,
saying, what other amazements
lie in the dark seed of the earth, yes,
I think I did right to go out alone
and give it back peacefully, and cover the place
with the reckless blossoms of weeds.
Ghosts
1.
Have you noticed?
2.
Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts
lay down on the earth and died
it’s hard to tell now
what’s bone, and what merely
was once.
The golden eagle, for instance,
has a bit of heaviness in him;
moreover the huge barns
seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off
toward deeper grass.
3.
1805
near the Bitterroot Mountains:
a man named Lewis kneels down
on the prairie watching
a sparrow’s nest cleverly concealed in the wild hyssop
and lined with buffalo hair. The chicks,
not more than a day hatched, lean
quietly into the thick wool as if
content, after all,
to have left the perfect world and fallen,
helpless and blind
into the flowered fields and the perils
of this one.
4.
In the book of the earth it is written:
nothing can die.
In the book of the Sioux it is written:
they have gone away into the earth to hide.
Nothing will coax them out again
but the people dancing.
5.
Said the old-timers:
the tongue
is the sweetest meat.
Passengers shooting from train windows
could hardly miss, they were
that many.
Afterward the carcasses
stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned
with slopes of white fat,
black ropes of blood—hellhunks
in the prairie heat.
6.
Have you noticed? how the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins. Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth as the herd stood
day after day, moon after moon
in their tribal circle, outwaiting
the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also
have you noticed? gone now.
7.
Once only, and then in a dream,
I watched while, secretly
a cow gave birth
to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him
in a warm corner
of the clear night
in the fragrant grass
in the wild domains
of the prairie spring, and I asked them,
in my dream I knelt down and asked them
to make room for me.
Carrying the Snake to the Garden
In the cellar
was the smallest snake
I have ever seen.
It coiled itself
in a corner
and watched me
with eyes
like two little stars
set into coal,
and a tail
that quivered.
One step
of my foot
and it fled
like a running shoelace,
but a scoop of the wrist
and I had it
in my hand.
I was sorry
for the fear,
so I hurried
upstairs and out the kitchen door
to the warm grass
and the sunlight
and the garden.
It turned and turned
in my hand
but when I put it down
it didn’t move.
I thought
it was going to flow
up my leg
and into my pocket.
I thought, for a moment,
as it lifted its face,
it was going to sing.
And then it was gone.
The Opossum
Beauty of fox, lemur, panther,
aardvark, thunder-worm, condor,
the quagga, the puffer, the kudu,
and this: the opossum
with her babies hanging on, gray lumps
all around the scaly tail
that was bent over her back, like a sailboat’s boom,
for the very small and oh! almost human baby-fingers
to cling to. At first I thought
it was some pitiful broken thing
lumping along over the scrubby leaves,
and then I saw the brown dog-softness of her long-lashed eyes
as, swiftly, with that wobbling burden of life upon her,
she ran.
This Is the One
The bear
who shuffles
over the hillsides
filling himself
with berries
until his tongue is purple
(which, remember, is
a royal color)—
the bear
who circles the cabin,
who will not steal the honey,
who will not rifle the knapsack
of the sleeping camper—
the one
who sits by himself
by the river,
who sings to himself
the secret song
no one has ever heard—
the bear
who yawns
with the cavernous mouth
of a shaggy god—
who, when he sees me
is solidly silent
and rises
on the mass of his legs,
disdainful and free
as anything on earth
could ever be—
this is the bear
I want to see.
At Herring Cove
The edge of the sea shines and glimmers. The tide rises and falls, on ordinary not on stormy days, about nine feet. The beach here is composed of sand and glacial drift; the many-colored pebbles of this drift have been well rounded by the water’s unceasing, manipulative, glassy touch. In addition, all sorts of objects are carried here by the currents, by the galloping waves, and left as the sea on the outgoing tide tumbles back.
From one tide to the next, and from one year to the next, what do I find here?
Grapefruit, and orange peel, and onion sacks from the fishing boats; balloons of all colors, with ribbons dangling; beer cans, soft drink cans, plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic bottle caps, feminine hygiene by-products, a few summers ago several hypodermic needles, the odd glove and the odd shoe, plastic glasses, old cigarette lighters, mustard bottles, plastic containers still holding the decomposing bodies of baitfish; fishhooks rusty or still shining, coils of fishline; balls of fishline, one with a razor-billed auk in a death-grip.
Sea clams, razor clams, mussels holding on with their long beards to stones or each other; a very occasional old oyster and quahog shell; other shells in varying degrees of whiteness: drills, whelks, jingles, slippers, periwinkles, moon snails. Bones of fish, bodies of fish and of skates, pipefish, goosefish, jellyfish, dogfish, starfish, sand dabs; blues or parts of blues or the pink, satiny guts of blues; sand eels in the blackened seaweed, silver, and spackled with salt.
Dead harbor seal, dead gull, dead merganser, dead gannet with tiny ivory-colored lice crawling over its snowy head and around its aster-blue eyes. Dead dovekie in winter.
Once, on a summer morning at exact low tide, the skull of a dolphin at the edge of the water. Later the flanged backbone, tail bones, hip bones slide onto the sand and return no more to the gardens of the sea.