Lightning

The oaks shone
gaunt gold
on the lip
of the storm before
the wind rose,
the shapeless mouth
opened and began
its five-hour howl;
the lights
went out fast, branches
sidled over
the pitch of the roof, bounced
into the yard
that grew black
within minutes, except
for the lightning – the landscape
bulging forth like a quick
lesson in creation, then
thudding away.  Inside,
as always,
it was hard to tell
fear from excitement:
how sensual
the lightning’s
poured stroke!  and still,
what a fire and a risk!
As always the body
wants to hide,
wants to flow toward it – strives
to balance while
fear shouts,
excitement shouts, back
and forth – each
bolt a burning river
tearing like escape through the dark
field of the other.

Mary Oliver

Image by Maxim Vorobiev.
 

Larval

The caterpillar,
interesting but not exactly lovely,
humped along among the parsley leaves
eating, always eating. Then
one night it was gone and in its place
a small green confinement hung by two silk threads
on a parsley stem. I think it took nothing with it
except faith, and patience. And then one morning
it expressed itself into the most beautiful being.

Mary Oliver

Image source.

Entering The Kingdom

The crows see me.
They stretch their glossy necks
In the tallest branches
Of green trees. I am
Possibly dangerous, I am
Entering the kingdom.
 
The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees-
To learn something by being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.

But the crows puff their feathers and cry
Between me and the sun,
And I should go now.
They know me for what I am.
No dreamer,
No eater of leaves.

Mary Oliver

Image by zoosan.

An Old Whorehouse

We climbed through a broken window,
walked through every room.

Out of business for years,
the mattresses held only

rainwater, and one
woman’s black shoe. Downstairs

spiders had wrapped up
the crystal chandelier.

A cracked cup lay in the sink.
But we were fourteen,

and no way dust could hide
the expected glamour from us,

or teach us anything.
We whispered, we imagined.

It would be years before
we’d learn how effortlessly

sin blooms, then softens,
like any bed of flowers.

Mary Oliver

Image by lilithfirefly.

Regarding The World's End On Friday

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver

Image source.

Nature

All night
  in and out the slippery shadows
    the owl hunted,
      the beads of blood
      
scarcely dry on the hooked beak before
  hunger again seized him
    and he fell, snipping
      the life from some plush breather,

and floated away
  into the crooked branches
    of the trees, that all night
      when on lapping

the sunken rain, and growing,
  bristling life
    spreading through all their branches
      as one by one

they tossed the white moon upward
  on its slow way
    to another morning
      in which nothing new

would ever happen,
  which is the true gift of nature,
    which is the reason
      we love it.

Forgive me.
  For hours I had tried to sleep
    and failed;
      restless and wild,

I could settle on nothing
  and fell, in envy
    of the things of darkness
      following their sleepy course--

the root and branch, the bloodied beak--
  even the screams from the cold leaves
    were as red songs that rose and fell
      in their accustomed place.

 Mary Oliver  

Image source.

Vultures

Like large dark
lazy
butterflies they sweep over
the glades looking
for death,
to eat it,
to make it vanish,
to make of it the miracle:
resurrection. No one
knows how many
they are who daily
minister so to the grassy
miles, no one
counts how many bodies
they discover
and descend to, demonstrating
each time the earth's
appetite, the unending
waterfalls of change.
No one,
moreover,
wants to ponder it,
how it will be
to feel the blood cool,
shapeliness dissolve.
Locked into
the blaze of our own bodies
we watch them
wheeling and drifting, we
honor them and we
loathe them,
however wise the doctrine,
however magnificent the cycles,
however ultimately sweet
the huddle of death to fuel
those powerful wings.

Mary Oliver

 Image by Yuri Bittar.
 

Mushrooms

Rain, and then
the cool pursed
lips of the wind
draw them
out of the ground -
red and yellow skulls
pummeling upward
through leaves, 
through grasses, 
through sand; astonishing
in their suddenness, 
their quietude, 
their wetness, they appear
on fall mornings, some
balancing in the earth
on one hoof
packed with poison, 
others billowing
chunkily, and delicious -
those who know
walk out to gather, choosing
the benign from flocks
of glitterers, sorcerers, 
russulas, 
panther caps, 
shark-white death angels
in their town veils
looking innocent as sugar
but full of paralysis: 
to eat
is to stagger down 
fast as mushrooms themselves
when they are done being perfect
and overnight
slide back under the shining
fields of rain. 

Mary Oliver

Image by Jayson Emery.