Fuck Yeah Mary Oliver

“Mary Oliver. In a region that has produced most of the nation’s poet laureates, it is risky to single out one fragile 71-year-old bard of Provincetown. But Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1983, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural world. Her Wild Geese has become so popular it now graces posters in dorm rooms across the land. But don’t hold that against her. Read almost anything in New and Selected Poems. She teaches us the profound act of paying attention—a living wonder that makes it possible to appreciate all the others.” — Renée Loth, Boston Globe, September 2, 2007

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You Do Not Have to Be Good

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body  love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

[fuckyeahmaryoliver]

Next Time

Next time what I'd do is look at the earth before saying anything. I'd stop just before going into a house and be an emperor for a minute and listen better to the wind       or to the air being still. When anyone talked to me, whether blame or praise or just passing time, I'd watch the face, how the mouth has to work, and see any strain, any sign of what lifted the voice. And for all, I'd know more -- the earth bracing itself and soaring, the air finding every leaf and feather over forest and water, and for every person the body glowing inside the clothes     like a light.

[fuckyeahmaryoliver]

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light – good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness."

[fuckyeahmaryoliver]

August

Our neighbor, tall and blonde and vigorous, the mother of many children, is sick. We did not know she was sick, but she has come to the fence, walking like a woman who is balancing a sword inside of her body, and besides that her long hair is gone, it is short and, suddenly, gray. I don’t recognize her. It even occurs to me that it might be her mother. But it’s her own laughter-edged voice, we have heard it for years over the hedges.

All summer the children, grown now and some of them with children of their own, come to visit. They swim, they go for long walks at the harbor, they make dinner for twelve, for fifteen, for twenty. In the early morning two daughters come to the garden and slowly go through the precise and silent gestures of T’ai Chi. They all smile. Their father smiles too, and builds castles on the shore with the children, and drives back to the city, and drives back to the country. A carpenter is hired—a roof repaired, a porch rebuilt. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Every day, we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes. (Photo Source: Cuba Gallery)

[fuckyeahmaryoliver]

Honey At The Table

It fills you with the soft essence of vanished flowers, it becomes a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow from the honey pot over the table

and out the door and over the ground, and all the while it thickens,

grows deeper and wilder, edged with pine boughs and wet boulders, pawprints of bobcat and bear, until

deep in the forest you shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark, you float into and swallow the dripping combs, bits of the tree, crushed bees--a taste composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.

(Honey Photo)

[fuckyeahmaryoliver]

The Deer (RIP Amy Winehouse)

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 wasn’t

the owned, tilled earth of today but the past. I did not see them the next day, or the next,

but in my mind’s 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 don’t do this

I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn’t just an idea…

When we die the body breaks open like a river; the old body goes on, climbing the hill.

(From House of Light)

[fuckyeahmaryoliver]

“Mary Oliver. In a region that has produced most of the nation’s poet laureates, it is risky to single out one fragile 71-year-old bard of Provincetown. But Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1983, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural world. Her Wild Geese has become so popular it now graces posters in dorm rooms across the land. But don’t hold that against her. Read almost anything in New and Selected Poems. She teaches us the profound act of paying attention—a living wonder that makes it possible to appreciate all the others.”

— Renée Loth, Boston Globe, September 2, 2007

[fuckyeahmaryoliver]

The Sun

Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone-- and how it slides again out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the world, like a red flower streaming upward on its heavenly oils, say, on a morning in early summer, at its perfect imperial distance-- and have you ever felt for anything such wild love-- do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough for the pleasure that fills you, as the sun reaches out, as it warms you as you stand there, empty-handed-- or have you too turned from this world-- or have you too gone crazy for power, for things? (Photo from Flickr by the Amazing and Aptly Named Aurora Demasi)

[fuckyeahmaryoliver]

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. (From her Pulitzer-Prize Winning Collection American Primitive, the poem that made me fall in love with her work. Photo by shnuckwits on Flickr.)

[fuckyeahmaryoliver]

"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift."

Mary Oliver