Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver has won many awards for her poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She is also the author of A Poetry Handbook. She was the William Blackburn Visiting Professor at Duke University, and in 1996 she joined the faculty of Bennington College.

In January and February I walk in the woods and look for a large nest in a tall tree. In my mind's eye I see the great horned, the early nester, sitting upon her bulk of sticks, like an old woman on a raft. Blue Pastures, 1995.

 

Once, on a summer morning at exact low tide, the skull of a dolphin at the edge of the water. Later the flanged backbone, tail bones, hip bones slide onto the sand and return no more to the gardens of the sea. Ibid.

 

The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world. Ibid.

 

Snowy egrets appear from time to time and prowl the edges of the larger ponds. They hunt with small, silky motions. Their long necks bend a little to the right, a little to the left, while their eyes stare with a mad concentration into the shallow water. Ibid.

 

Who would tell the mockingbird his song is frivolous, since it lacks words? Ibid.

 

Do you think the wren ever dreams of a better house? Ibid.

 

Perhaps dreaming is meditating, before language existed. Animals certainly dream. Ibid.

 

If you kill for knowledge,
what is the name of what you have lost? Ibid.

 

The danger of people becoming infatuated with knowledge. Thoreau gassing the moth to get a perfect specimen. Audubon pushing the needle into the bittern's heart. Ibid.

 

Just at the lacy edge of the sea, a dolphin's skull. Recent, but perfectly clean. An extremely beautiful. I held it in my hands, I was so excited I was breathless. What will I do? Ibid.

 

From my way of thinking, Thoreau frequently seems an overly social person. Ibid.

 

Hasn't the end of the world been coming absolutely forever? Ibid.

 

It's almost six A.M.
The mockingbird's still singing.
I'm on my way to the ocean,
with the sun, just rising,
on my left shoulder,
and the moon,
like a circle of pale snow,
lingering on my right.
Ibid.

 

Thousands of small fish are moving along in the shallows: a flock, a flight under the weight of the water, dipping and rising . . . It is summer, the long twilight. I stare and stare into the water. I say to myself, which one am I? Ibid.

 

The fox is sitting on a sandy rise, it is looking at me. It yawns, the pickets of its teeth glitter. It scratches under its jaw, rises, and in slow, haunchy nonchalance leaps over the slopes of sand, then down a path, walking, then trotting; then it sprints into the shadows under the trees, as if into water, and is gone. Ibid.

 

Nature, the total of all of us, is the wheel that drives our world; those who ride it willingly might yet catch a glimpse of a dazzling , even a spiritual restfulness, while those who are unwilling simply to hang on, who insist that the world must be piloted by man for his won benefit, will be dragged around and around all the same, gathering dust but no joy. Ibid.