Mary Oliver - Dream Work

DREAM WORK BOOKS BY MARY OLIVER American Primitive Twelve Moons The River Styx, Ohio and Other Poems No Voyage and Other Poems CHAPBOOKS Sleeping in the Forest The Night Traveler DREAM WORK Mary Oliver THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS NEW YORK Copyright 1986 by Mary Oliver All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003. Published simultaneously in Canada Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oliver, Mary, 1935 Dream work. I. 841 Broadway New York, NY 10003 Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com 06 07 08 09 10 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 Note to Reader The Atlantic Monthly Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. 841 Broadway New York, NY 10003 Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com 06 07 08 09 10 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 Note to Reader The Atlantic Monthly Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Pellentesque Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be marked with a shallow indent. Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems. CONTENTS Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing kept flickering in with the tide and looking around.

Black as a fishermans boot, with a white belly. If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin, which was rough as a thousand sharpened nails. And you know what a smile means, dont you? I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while. It was evening, and no longer summer. Three small fish, I dont know what they were, huddled in the highest ripples as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body one gesture, one black sleeve that could fit easily around the bodies of three small fish. Also I wanted to be able to love.

And we all know how that one goes, dont we? Slowly the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water. You dont want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I dont want to tell it, I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun. And anyway its the same old story a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive. Mostly, I want to be kind. And nobody, of course, is kind, or mean, for a simple reason. And look! look! look! I think those little fish better wake up and dash themselves away from the hopeless future that is bulging toward them. And probably, if they dont waste time looking for an easier world, they can do it. And probably, if they dont waste time looking for an easier world, they can do it.

Every morning the world is created. Under the orange sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again and fasten themselves to the high branches and the ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands of summer lilies. If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere. And if your spirit carries within it the thorn that is heavier than lead if its all you can do to keep on trudging there is still 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. 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; mutttering 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? Every spring among the ambiguities of childhood the hillsides grew white with the wild trilliums.

I believed in the world. Oh, I wanted to be easy in the peopled kingdoms, to take my place there, but there was none that I could find shaped like me. So I entered through the tender buds, I crossed the cold creek, my backbone and my thin white shoulders unfolding and stretching. From the time of snow-melt, when the creek roared and the mud slid and the seeds cracked, I listened to the earth-talk, the root-wrangle, the arguments of energy, the dreams lying just under the surface, then rising, becoming at the last moment flaring and luminous the patient parable of every spring and hillside year after difficult year. You are the dark song of the morning; serious and slow, you shave, you dress, you descend the stairs in your public clothes and drive away, you become the wise and powerful one who makes all the days possible in the world. But you were also the red song in the night, stumbling through the house to the childs bed, to the damp rose of her body, leaving your bitter taste.