Mary Oliver

Percy wakes me (fourteen)Percy wakes me and I am not ready.He has slept all night under the covers.Now he__ eager for action: a walk, then breakfast.So I hasten up. He is sitting on the kitchen counter Where he is not supposed to be. How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you Needed me, To wake me. He thought he would a lecture and deeply His eyes begin to shine.He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.He squirms and squeals: he has done something That he needed And now he hears that it is okay. I scratch his ears. I turn him over And touch him everywhere. He isWild with the okayness of it. Then we walk, then He has breakfast, and he is happy.This is a poem about Percy.This is a poem about more than Percy.Think about it.

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple -- or a green field -- a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing -- an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness --wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak --to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be

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

Of course! the path to heavendoesn't lie down in flat miles.It's in the imaginationwith which you perceive this world,and the gestureswith which you honor it.-from The Swan

Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

I believe you did not have a happy life.I believe you were cheated.I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness.I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and unassuaged.Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillsides.

No, I mean really listen. Here's a story, and you don't have to visit manyhouses to find it. One person is talking,the other one is not really listening.someone can look like they are but they'reactually thinking about something they want to say, or their minds are justwandering. Or they're looking at thatlittle box people hold in their hands thesedays. And people get discouraged, so theyquit trying. And the very quiet people,you may have noticed, are often the sadpeople.

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think__o, you will realize__hat it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without doubt,I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.

Oh Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing towards you.

The Fourth Sign of The Zodiac (Part 3) by Mary OliverI know, you never intended to be in this world.But you__e in it all the same.So why not get started immediately.I mean, belonging to it.There is so much to admire, to weep over.And to write music or poems about.Bless the feet that take you to and fro.Bless the eyes and the listening ears.Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.Bless touching.You could live a hundred years, it__ happened.Or not.I am speaking from the fortunate platformof many years,none of which, I think, I ever wasted.Do you need a prod?Do you need a little darkness to get you going?Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,and remind you of Keats,so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,he had a lifetime.Mary oliver

That timeI thought I could notgo any closer to griefwithout dyingI went closer,and I did not die.Surely Godhad his hand in this,as well as friends.Still, I was bent,and my laughter,as the poet said,was nowhere to be found.Then said my friend Daniel,(brave even among lions),__t__ not the weight you carrybut how you carry it -books, bricks, grief -it__ all in the wayyou embrace it, balance it, carry itwhen you cannot, and would not,put it down.__o I went practicing.Have you noticed?Have you heardthe laughterthat comes, now and again,out of my startled mouth?How I lingerto admire, admire, admirethe things of this worldthat are kind, and maybealso troubled -roses in the wind,the sea geese on the steep waves,a loveto which there is no reply?

And now you'll be telling storiesof my coming backand they won't be false, and they won't be truebut they'll be real

A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday 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.

Wild GeeseYou do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor 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 rainare 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 __ver and over announcing your placein the family of things.