Posts tagged mary oliver
Posts tagged mary oliver
“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.”
Mary Oliver, from her poem “Dogfish.”
I mistyped “alive” as “alove.” That too.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.—Mary Oliver
“For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished
into the world.”
Mary Oliver, from “One or Two Things.”
“All afternoon it rained, then
such power came down from the clouds
on a yellow thread,
as authoritative as God is supposed to be.
When it hit the tree, her body
opened forever.
*****
Where life has no purpose,
and is neither civil nor intelligent,
it begins
to rain,
it begins
to smell like the bodies
of flowers.
At the back of the neck
the old skin splits.
The snake shivers
but does not hesitate.
He inches forward.
He beings to bleed through
like satin.”
Mary Oliver, the opening and closing stanzas of “Rain.”
Opened by the divine, opened by the serpent, and either way, transformed.
“and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes,
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows -
so I thought:
maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us -
as soft as feathers -
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,
not with amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow -
that is nothing but light - scalding, aortal light -
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.”
Mary Oliver, from “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field”
Fiat lux.
