Mary Oliver - House of Light. Poems

Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl? Who has it, and who doesnt? I keep looking around me. The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus. The swan opens her white wings slowly. In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness. One question leads to another. Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg? Like the eye of a hummingbird? Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop? Why should I have it, and not the anteater who loves her children? Why should I have it, and not the camel? Come to think of it, what about the maple trees? What about the blue iris? What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight? What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves? What about the grass? The kingfisher rises out of the black wave like a blue flower, in his beak he carries a silver leaf.

I think this is the prettiest worldso long as you dont mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesnt have its splash of happiness? There are more fish than there are leaves on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher wasnt born to think about it, or anything else. When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water remains waterhunger is the only story he has ever heard in his life that he could believe. I dont say hes right. Neither do I say hes wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry I couldnt rouse out of my thoughtful body if my life depended on it, he swings back over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it (as I long to do something, anything) perfectly. On the curving, dusty roads we drove through the plantations where the pickers balanced on the hot hillsides then we climbed toward the green trees, toward the white scarves of the clouds, to the inn that is never closed in this island of fairest weather.

The sun hung like a stone, time dripped away like a steaming river and from somewhere a dry tongue lashed out its single motto: now and forever. And the pickers balanced on the hot hillsides like gray and blue blossoms, wrapped in their heavy layers of clothes against the whips of the branches in that world of leaves no poor man, with a brown face and an empty sack, has ever picked his way out of. At the inn we stepped from the car to the garden, where tea was brought to us scalding in white cups from the fire. Dont ask if it was the fire of honey or the fire of death, dont ask if we were determined to live, at last, with merciful hearts. We sat among the unforgettable flowers. We let the white cups cool before we raised them to our lips.

Today is Gustav Mahlers birthday, and as usual I went out early into the sea-green morning where the birds were singing, all over but mostly at the scalloped edges of the ponds and in the branches of the trees, which flared out and down, like the clothes of our spirits patiently waiting. For hours I wandered over the fields and the only thing that kept me company was a song, it glided along with my delicious dark happiness, my heavy, bristling and aching delight at the world which has been like this forever and forever the leaves, the birds, the ponds, the loneliness, and, sometimes, from a lifetime ago and another country such a willing and lilting companion a song made so obviously for me. At what unknowable cost. And by a stranger. Now I see it it nudges with its bulldog head the slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble; and now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal who is leading her soft children from one side of the pond to the other; she keeps close to the edge and they follow closely, the good children the tender children, the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet into the darkness. And now will comeI can count on itthe murky splash, the certain victory of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart will be most mournful on their account.

But, listen, whats important? Nothings important except that the great and cruel mystery of the world, of which this is a part, not be denied. Once, I happened to see, on a city street, in summer, a dusty, fouled turtle plodding along a snapper broken out I suppose from some backyard cage and I knew what I had to do I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it I put it, like a small mountain range, into a knapsack, and I took it out of the city, and I let it down into the dark pond, into the cool water, and the light of the lilies, to live. You never know. The body of night opens like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke, like so many wrappings of mist. And on the hillside two deer are walking along just as though this wasnt the owned, tilled earth of today but the past. I did not see them the next day, or the next, but in my minds eye there they are, in the long grass, like two sisters.

This is the earnest work. Each of us is given only so many mornings to do it to look around and love the oily fur of our lives, the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle. Days I dont do this I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isnt just an idea. When we die the body breaks open like a river; the old body goes on, climbing the hill. cries for the north it hopes it can find. plunges, and comes up with a slapping pickerel. blinks its red eye. cries again. you come every afternoon, and wait to hear it. you sit a long time, quiet, under the thick pines, in the silence that follows. as though it were your own twilight. as though it were your own vanishing song. as though it were your own vanishing song.

Who can say, is it a snowy egret or a white flower standing at the glossy edge of the lily and frog-filled pond? Hours ago the orange sun opened the cups of the lilies and the leopard frogs began kicking their long muscles, breast-stroking like little green dwarves under the roof of the rich, iron-colored water. Now the soft eggs of the salamander in their wrappings of jelly begin to shiver. Theyre tired of sleep. They have a new idea. They want to swim away into the world. Who could stop them? Who could tell them to go cautiously, to flow slowly under the lily pads? Off they go, hundreds of them, like the black fingerprints of the rain.

The frogs freeze into perfect five-fingered shadows, but suddenly the flower has fire-colored eyes and one of the shadows vanishes. Clearly, now, the flower is a bird. It lifts its head, it lifts the hinges of its snowy wings, tossing a moment of light in every direction, like a chandelier, and then once more is still. The salamanders, like tiny birds, locked into formation, fly down into the endless mysteries of the transforming water, and how could anyone believe that anything in this world is only what it appears to be that anything is ever final that anything, in spite of its absence, ever dies a perfect death? This morning I watched the pale green cones of the rhododendrons opening their small pink and red blouses the bodies of the flowers were instantly beautiful to the bees, they hurried out of that dark place in the thick tree one after another, an invisible line upon which their iridescence caught fire as the sun caught them, sliding down. Is there anything more important than hunger and happiness? Each bee entered the frills of a flower to find the sticky fountain, and if some dust spilled on the walkways of the petals and caught onto their bodies, I dont know if the bees know that otherwise death is everywhere, even in the red swamp of a flower. And the flowers, as daft as mud, poured out their honey. And the flowers, as daft as mud, poured out their honey.