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.

Don’t bother me.
I’ve just
been born.

now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever

which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished
into the world.

Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;

it needs the body’s world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is —
so it enters us —
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

then they suddenly fall
in response to their wish,
which is always the same —
to succeed again and again.

What they eat
is neither fruit nor grain,
what they cry out
is sharper than a sharp word.