Mary Oliver

There is a place in the woods where the vanishing bodies of our dogs, our dogs of the past, lie in the sweet-smelling earth. How they ran through these woods! Too late, world, to deny them their lives of motion, of burly happiness. After Luke died, I crossed and recrossed the Province Lands, wherever we had been, and wherever I found her paw-prints in the sand I dragged branches and leaves and slabs of bark over them, so they would last, would keep from the wind a long time. Then, overnight, after maybe three weeks, in a dazzling, rearranging rain, they were gone.

And Him, somewhere, ponderously lifting another world,
setting it free to spin, if it can,
in a darkness you can’t imagine.

My dog didn’t know
what dogs usually do.

The way I’d like to go on living in this world
wouldn’t hurt anything, I’d just go on
walking uphill and downhill, looking around

What I gave him
wouldn’t keep a dog alive.
What he gave me
from the brown coin
of his sweating face
was a look of cunning.
I carry it

clearly nothing
needed to be saved.

At one I paused
to drink, and inside me
the water whispered: And now, like us,
you are a million years old.

looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns

the doorway that belongs
to you and me.

Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy
but want to be friends;