Emerging

Bowing to the Empress

Through the forest
through the branches
of shagbarks and walnuts,
through the feathers
of the February snow,
she flows
to her nest
of a thousand
broken and braided sticks,
to her chicks
yelping like tiny wolves,
like downy
emperors, for her return,
for her attention
for red meat,
and you know
theirs is a decent task
in the scheme of things-
the hunters,
the rapacious
plucking up the timid
like so many soft jewels.
They are what keeps everything
enough, but not too many-
and so you bow
to the lightning of her eyes,
the pick of her beak,
the swale of her appetite
and even to her shadow
over the field-when it passes
you can hardly breathe
the world is that bright,
your sense so sharply tuned
by the notion of oblivion-
those black wings beating
at the light.

Mary Oliver

One Thing

The butterfly's loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of the flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.

Mary Oliver
excerpt from One Or Two Things

Harmony

Thought Full

Double Roses

Awakening

Inside Out

Fallout

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Carried Away By A Notion

Wings

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Starlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,


dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Mary Oliver

Pause

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I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

TS Elliot

Movement

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Autumn Movement

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go, not one lasts.

Carl Sandburg
1918