Mary Oliver - West Wind. Poems

My thanks to the editors of the following magazines in
which some of these poems, sometimes in slightly different
form, have previously been printed.

Amicus, The cricket...; At the Shore; Sand Dabs, Three

Appalachia, Black Oaks, The Dog Has Run Off Again

Country Journal, The Osprey

Michigan (Quarterly Review, At Round Pond

Ohio Review, And what did you think love would be like?

Orion, The Rapture

Poetry, Forty Years, Pilot Snake

Provincetown Arts, Dogs, Shelley, Stars, You are young...,
If there is life after the earth-life...

Shenandoah, Three Songs, Seven White Butterflies

The Southern Review, Spring

Some persons of a scientific turn were once discoursing pompously and, to him, distastefully, about the incredible distance of the planets, the length of time light takes to travel to the earth, &c., when he burst out," 'Tis false! I was walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I touched the sky with my stick."

Life and Works of William Blake, A. Gilchrist

Seven white butterflies
delicate in a hurry look
how they bang the pages
of their wings as they fly

to the fields of mustard yellow
and orange and plain
gold all eternity
is in the moment this is what

Blake said Whitman said such
wisdom in the agitated
motions of the mind seven
dancers floating

even as worms toward
paradise see how they banter
and riot and rise
to the trees flutter

lob their white bodies into
the invisible wind weightless
lacy willing
to deliver themselves unto

the universe now each settles
down on a yellow thumb on a
brassy stem now
all seven are rapidly sipping

from the golden towers who
would have thought it could be so easy?

owl
make your little appearance now

owl dark bird bird of gloom
messenger reminder

of death
that can't be stopped

argued with leashed put out
like a red fire but

burns as it will
owl

I have not seen you now for
too long a time don't

hide away but come flowing and clacking
the slap of your wings

your death's head oh rise
out of the thick and shaggy pines when you

look down with your
golden eyes how everything

trembles
then settles

from mere incidence into
the lush of meaning.

Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,
or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.

Not one can manage a single sound, though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.

But to tell the truth after a while I'm pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen

and you can't keep me from the woods, from the tonnage
of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to anotherwhy don't you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,
I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

and I should start shouting his name
and clapping my hands,
but it has been raining all night
and the narrow creek has risen
is a tawny turbulence is rushing along
over the mossy stones
is surging forward
with a sweet loopy music
and therefore I don't want to entangle it
with my own voice
calling summoning
my little dog to hurry back
look the sunlight and the shadows are chasing each other
listen how the wind swirls and leaps and dives up and down
who am I to summon his hard and happy body
his four white feet that love to wheel and pedal
through the dark leaves
to come back to walk by my side, obedient.

Am I not among the early risers
and the long-distance walkers?

Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider
the perfection of the morning star
above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees
blue in the first light?
Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though
sheets of water flowed over them
though it is only wind, that common thing,
free to everyone, and everything?

Have I not thought, for years, what it would be
worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail,
to gather blueberries,
thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer?

What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly
at the top of the field,
her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine,
has not already done?

What countries, what visitations,
what pomp
would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods
on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?

Here is an amazementonce I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

Above the modest house and the palacethe same darkness.
Above the evil man and the just, the same stars.

Above the child who will
recover and the child who will not recover, the same energies roll forward,
from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.

I bow down.

Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment,
or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other than mine
in the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table?
Have I ever taken good fortune for granted?

Have I not, every spring, befriended the swarm that pours forth?
Have I not summoned the honey-man to come, to hurry,
to bring with him the white and comfortable hive?

And, while I waited, have I not leaned close, to see everything?
Have I not been stung as I watched their milling and gleaming,
and stung hard?

Have I not been ready always at the iron door,
not knowing to what country it opensto death or to more life?

Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold
or the night too long and as black as oil anyway,
or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely
of the second-rate, less than happiness

as I stepped down from the porch and set out along
the green paths of the world?

had it
lived it would have grown
from twelve inches to a
hundred maybe would have

set out to eat
all the rats of the world and managed
a few would have frightened
somebody sooner or later

as it crossed the road would have been
feared and hated and shied away from
black glass lunging
in the green sea

in the long blades of the grass
but now look death too
is a carpenter how all his
helpers the shining ants

labor the tiny
knives of their mouths
dipping and slashing how they
hurry in and out

of that looped body taking
apart opening up now the soul
flashes like a star and is gone there is only
that soft dark building
death.

This morning
the dogs
were romping and stomping
on their nailed feet

they had hemmed in
a little thing
a field mouse
so I picked it up

and held it
in the purse of my hands,
where it was safe
but it turned

on the blank face
of my thumb