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Posts tagged “American Primitive”

Music, by Mary Oliver

td Whittle

Posted on July 31, 2013

NSW

 

I tied together

a few slender reeds, cut

notches to breathe across and made

such music you stood

shock still and then

 

followed as I wandered growing

moment by moment

slant-eyed and shaggy, my feet

slamming over the rocks, growing

hard as horn, and there

 

you were behind me, drowning

in the music, letting

the silver clasps out of your hair,

hurrying, taking off

your clothes.

 

*

 

I can’t remember

where this happened but I think

it was late summer when everything

is full of fire and rounding to fruition

and whatever doesn’t,

or resists,

must lie like a field of dark water under

the pulling moon,

tossing and tossing.

 

*

 

In the brutal elegance of cities

I have walked down

the halls of hotels

 

and heard this music behind

shut doors.

 

*

 

Do you think the heart

is accountable? Do you think the body

any more than a branch

of the honey locust tree,

 

hunting water,

hunching toward the sun,

shivering, when it feels

that good, into

white blossoms?

 

Or do you think there is a kind

of music, a certain strand

that lights up the otherwise

blunt wilderness of the body —

a furious

and unaccountable selectivity?

 

*

 

Ah well, anyway, whether or not

it was in late summer, or even

in our part of the world, it is all

only a dream. I did not

turn into the lithe goat god. Nor did you come running

like that.

 

*

 

Did you?

 

“Music” from American Primitive

Poems by Mary Oliver

Little Brown & Company, New York 1983

Photo by Robin Whittle

 

 

In Blackwater Woods, by Mary Oliver

td Whittle

Posted on July 20, 2013

Ophelia-by-JE-Millais

Ophelia, by Sir John Everett Millais, c. 1851-1852 (Tate Gallery, London)

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

 

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

 

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

 

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

 

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

 

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

 

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

 

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

 

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

 

“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

  

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