Happy Birthday, Mary

It's the birthday of poet Mary Oliver.

FALL

the black oaks

fling their bronze fruit

into all the pockets of the earth

     pock pock

they knock against the thresholds

the roof the sidewalk

fill the eaves

     the bottom line

of the old gold song

of the almost finished year

what is spring all that tender

     green stuff

compared to this

falling of tiny oak trees

out of the oak trees

     then the clouds

gathering thick along the west

then advancing

then closing over

     breaking open

the silence

then the rain

dashing its silver seeds

     against the house

THE KINGFISHER

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave

like a blue flower, in his beak

he carries a silver leaf. I think this is

the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind

a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life

that doesn't have its splash of happiness?

There are more fish than there are leaves

on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher

wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.

When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water

remains water--hunger is the only story

he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.

I don't say he's right. Neither

do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf

with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry

I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body

if my life depended on it, he swings back

over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it

(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

EVERY MORNING

                   

I read the papers,

I unfold them and examine them in the sunlight.

The way the red mortars, in photographs,

arc down into neighborhoods

like stars, the way death

combs everything into a gray rubble before

the camera moves on. What

dark part of my soul

shivers: you don't want to know more

about this. And then: you don't know anything

unless you do. How the sleepers

wake and run to the cellars,

how the children scream, their tongues

trying to swim away--

how the morning itself appears

like a slow white rose

while the figures climb over the bubbled thresholds,

move among the smashed cars, the streets

where the clanging ambulances won't

stop all day--death and death, messy death--

death as history, death as a habit--

how sometimes the camera pauses while a family

counts itself, and all of them are alive,

their mouths dry caves of wordlessness

in the smudged moons of their faces,

a craziness we have so far no name for--

all this I read in the papers,

in the sunlight,

I read with my cold, sharp eyes.