Billie Dee's
Electronic Poetry
Anthology
Mary Oliver
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mary Oliver is one of the most powerful living American poets, and my personal favorite. She writes about the natural world and her own, often quirky, experience of it. There are no other people in these poems; there is much mystery. I can't get enough of her.
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Morning
Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.
-- New and Selected Poems, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992
Farm Country
I have sharpened my knives, I have
Put on the heavy apron.
Maybe you think life is chicken soup, served
In blue willow-pattern bowls.
I have put on my boots and opened
The kitchen door and stepped out
Into the sunshine. I have crossed the lawn,
I have entered
The hen house.
-- New and Selected Poems, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992
August
When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.
-- American Primitive, 1983
The Fish
The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.
-- American Primitive, 1983
At the Lake
A fish leaps
like a black pin --
then -- when the starlight
strikes its side --
like a silver pin.
In an instant
the fish's spine
alters the fierce line of rising
and it curls a little --
the head, like scalloped tin,
plunges back,
and it's gone.
This is, I think,
what holiness is:
the natural world,
where every moment is full
of the passion to keep moving.
Inside every mind
there's a hermit's cave
full of light,
full of snow,
full of concentration.
I've knelt there,
and so have you,
hanging on
to what you love,
to what is lovely.
The lake's
shining sheets
don't make a ripple now,
and the stars
are going off to their blue sleep,
but the words are in place --
and the fish leaps, and leaps again
from the black plush of the poem,
that breathless space.
-- White Pine, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994
Other Links
The Mary Oliver Page
Soft Animal: the Poery of Mary Oliver
The Atlantic Monthly -- Mary Oliver: Mockingbirds