Mary Oliver

Love, love, love, says Percy.And hurry as fast as you canalong the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.Then, go to sleep.Give up your body heat, your beating heart.Then, trust.

MYSTERIES, YES Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising. How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken. How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem. Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies__n holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don't mean to indicatea preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world__mong people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees.

But very little of it can do morethan start you on your way to the real, unimaginablydifficult goal of writing memorably. That work is doneslowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carryingwater in a sieve.

oxygen Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, while it calls the earth its home, the soul. So the merciful, noisy machine stands in our house working away in its lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel before the fire, stirring with a stick of iron, letting the logs lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room, are in your usual position, leaning on your right shoulder which aches all day. You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything? Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. Then it settles to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift: our purest, sweet necessity: the air.

EVERY DOG__ STORYI have a bed, my very own.It__ just my size.And sometimes I like to sleep alonewith dreams inside my eyes.But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepyand I wake and am afraid, though I don__ know why.But I__ no longer sleepyand too slowly the hours go by.So I climb on the bed where the light of the moonis shining on your faceand I know it will be morning soon.Everybody needs a safe place.

Be prepared. A dog is adorable and noble.A dog is a true and loving friend. A dogis also a hedonist.

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him.The other dog__he one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk__s what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind.Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.

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

To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again.

It's not a competition, it's a doorway.

I would like people to remember of me, howinexhaustible was her mindfulness.

I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life _ that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest. In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change _ there__ never been a day that my friends haven__ been able to say, and at a distance, __here__ Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook._ But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel. Restless. I read about ideas. Yet I let them remain ideas. I read about the poet who threw his books away, the better to come to a spiritual completion. Yet I keep my books. I flutter; I am attentive, maybe I even rise a little, balancing; then I fall back.

Listen, whatever you see and love__hat__ where you are.

Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face.Hello, you who made the morningand spread it over the fieldsand into the faces of the tulipsand the nodding morning glories,and into the windows of, even, themiserable and the crotchety _ best preacher that ever was,dear star, that just happensto be where you are in the universeto keep us from ever-darkness,to ease us with warm touching,to hold us in the great hands of light __ood morning, good morning, good morning.Watch, now, how I start the dayin happiness, in kindness.

Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part - the content, the place, the diction, the rhythm, the tone-as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.