For LK

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches

of other lives --

tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,

hanging

from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,

feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides

with perfect courtesy, to let you in!

Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!

Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over

the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint

that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?

Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot

in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself

continually?

Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed

with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left --

fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away

from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is

the mystery, which is death as well as life, and

not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome

with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine

god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,

nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the

present hour,

to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,

to the tiplets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night.

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult

than the wakening from a little sleep.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said

to the wild roses:

deny me not,

but suffer my devotion.

Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge-red,

hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,

caution and prudence?

Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds.

A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next

is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,

upon the immutable.

What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,

and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,

I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.

I float.

I ramble my way home.

~ Mary Oliver ~


(West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems, New and Selected Poems, Volume Two)

Hear Mary Oliver read this and many other lovely poems here.