Cover

Title Page

OTHER BOOKS BY MARY OLIVER

POETRY
No Voyage and Other Poems
The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems
Twelve Moons
American Primitive
Dream Work
House of Light
New and Selected Poems Volume One
White Pine
West Wind
The Leaf and the Cloud
What Do We Know
Owls and Other Fantasies
Why I Wake Early
Blue Iris
New and Selected Poems Volume Two
Thirst
Red Bird
The Truro Bear and Other Adventures

CHAPBOOKS AND SPECIAL EDITIONS
The Night Traveler
Sleeping in the Forest
Provincetown
Wild Geese (UK Edition)

PROSE
A Poetry Handbook
Blue Pastures
Rules for the Dance
Winter Hours
Long Life
Our World (with photographs by Molly Malone Cook)

Dedication

For Anne Taylor

We create ourselves by our choices.

—Kierkegaard

Yellow

There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.

Swans

They appeared
    over the dunes,
they skimmed the trees
and hurried on

to the sea
    or some lonely pond
        or wherever it is
            that swans go,

urgent, immaculate,
    the heat of their eyes
        staring down
            and then away,

the thick spans
    of their wings
        as bright as snow,
            their shoulder-power

echoing
    inside my own body.
        How could I help but adore them?
            How could I help but wish

that one of them might drop
    a white feather
        that I should have
            something in my hand

to tell me
    that they were real?
        Of course
            this was foolish.

What we love, shapely and pure,
    is not to be held,
        but to be believed in.
            And then they vanished, into the unreachable distance.

Heart Poem

My heart, that used to pump along so pleasantly, has come now to a different sort of music.

There is someone inside those red walls, irritated and even, occasionally, irrational.

Years ago I was part of an orchestra; our conductor was a wild man. He was forever rapping the music- stand for silence. Then he would call out some correction and we would begin again.

Now again it is the wild man.

I remember the music shattering, and our desperate attentiveness.

Once he flung the baton over our heads and into the midst of the players. It flew over the violins and landed next to a bass fiddle. It flopped to the floor. What silence! Then someone picked it up and it was passed forward back to him. He rapped the stand and raised his arms. Then we all breathed again, and the music restarted.

Prince Buzzard

Prince Buzzard,
    I took you, so high in the air,
        for a narrow boat and two black sails.
            You were drifting

in the depths of the air
    wherever you wanted to go,
        and when you came down
            with your spoony mouth

and your red head
    and your creaking wings
        to the lamb
            dead, dead, dead

in the fields of spring
    I knew it was hunger
        that brought you—
            yet you went about it

so slowly,
    settling with hunched wings
        and silent
            as the grass itself

over the lamb’s white body—
    it seemed
        a ceremony,
            a pause

as though something
    in the quick of your own body
        had come out
            to give thanks