Mary

Having some time to kill before my train out of the city last night, I decided to just browse at the Borders above Penn Station. Instead, I boarded the train not only with snacks-as-dinner, but a new Mary Oliver book. Oops. But! Red Bird, her 2nd-newest collection of poetry, is sublime. A taste:

Percy* and Books (Eight)

Percy does not like it when I read a book.
He puts his face over the top of it and moans.
He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.
The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.
The tide is out and the neighbor's dogs are playing.
But Percy, I say. Ideas! The elegance of language!
The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories
that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.

Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.
Let's go.

* Percy is a dog.


Summer Story

When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into the funnels

of the blossoms,
and the tongue
leaps out
and throbs,

I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in this world

that aren't
pieces of gold
or power---
that nobody owns

or could buy even
for a hillside of money---
that just
float about the world,

or drift over the fields,
or into the gardens,
and into the tents of the vines,
and now here I am

spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling,
so that I feel I am myself

a small bird
with a terrible hunger,
with a thin beak probing and dipping
and a heart that races so fast

it is only a heartbeat ahead of breaking---
and I am the hunger and the assaugement,
and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,
and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking.