“I’d been to the beaches around La Push many times during my Forks summers with Charlie, so the mile-long crescent of First Beach was familiar to me. It was still breathtaking. The water was dark gray, even in the sunlight, white-capped and heaving to the gray, rocky shore. Islands rose out of the steel harbor waters with sheer cliff sides, reaching to uneven summits, and crowned with austere, soaring firs. The beach had only a thin border of actual sand at the water’s edge, after which it grew into millions of large, smooth stones that looked uniformly gray from a distance, but close up were every shade a stone could be; terra-cotta, sea green, lavender, blue gray, dull gold. The tide line was strewn with huge driftwood trees, bleached bone white in the salt waves, some piled together against the edge of the forest fringe, some lying solitary, just out of reach of the waves.”

Red Bird

Red bird came all winter

firing up the landscape

as nothing else could.

Of course I love the sparrows,

those dun-colored darlings,

so hungry and so many.

I am a God-fearing feeder of birds.

I know He has many children,

not all of them bold in spirit.

Still, for whatever reason--

perhaps because the winter is so long

and the sky so black-blue,

or perhaps because the heart narrows

as often as it opens--

I am grateful

that red bird comes all winter

firing up the landscape

as nothing else can do.

Mary Oliver, Red Bird, 2008

Desire

So long as I am hanging on

I want to be young and noble.

I want to be bold.

So said the great buck, named Swirler,

as he stepped like a king past me

the week before he was arrow-killed.

And so said the wren in the bush

after another hard year

of love, of nest-life, of singing.

And so say I

every morning, just before sunrise,

wading the edge of the dark ocean.

--Mary Oliver, Redbird, 2008

On Valentine's Day

Of Love

I have been in love more times than one,

thank the Lord. Sometimes it was lasting

whether active or not. Sometimes

it was all but ephemeral, maybe only

an afternoon, but not less real for that.

They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,

or anyway people beautiful to me, of which

there are so many. You, and you, and you,

whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe

missed. Love, love, love, it was the

core of my life, from which, of course, comes

the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned

that some of them were men and some were women

and some--now carry my revelation with you--

were trees. Or places. Or music flying above

the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun

which was the first, and the best, the most

loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into

my eyes, every morning. So I imagine

such love of the world--its fervency, its shining, its

innocence and hunger to give of itself--I imagine

this is how it began.

--Mary Oliver, Redbird, 2008