Free Red Bird: Poems by Mary Oliver Page A

sweet clamor of passion?
Something else—something else entirely
    holds me in thrall.
That you have a life that I wonder about
    more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a life—courteous, intelligent—
    that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a soul—your own, no one else’s—
    that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
So that I find my soul clapping its hands for yours
    more than my own.

Someday
Even the oldest of the trees continues its wonderful labor.
Hummingbird lives in one of them.
He’s there for the white blossoms, and the secrecy.
The blossoms could be snow, with a dash of pink.
At first the fruit is small and green and hard.
Everything has dreams, hope, ambition.
If I could I would always live in such shining obedience
where nothing but the wind trims the boughs.
I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life.
I’m sorry I wasn’t wiser sooner.
I’m sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely.
Oh, love, lay your hands upon me again.
Some of the fruit ripens and is picked and is delicious.
Some of it falls and the ants are delighted.
Some of it hides under the snow and the famished deer are saved.

Red Bird Explains Himself
“Yes, I was the brilliance floating over the snow
and I was the song in the summer leaves, but this was
only the first trick
I had hold of among my other mythologies,
for I also knew obedience: bringing sticks to the nest,
food to the young, kisses to my bride.
But don’t stop there, stay with me: listen.
If I was the song that entered your heart
then I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed,
and thus wilderness bloomed there, with all its
followers: gardeners, lovers, people who weep
for the death of rivers.
And this was my true task, to be the
music of the body. Do you understand? for truly the body needs
a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work,
the soul has need of a body,
and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable
beauty of heaven
where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,
and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart.”

I thank the editors of the following magazines in which some of the poems have previously appeared, sometimes in slightly different form.
    Appalachia: “From This River, When I Was a Child, I Used to Drink”
    Bark: “Percy (Nine)”
    Cape Cod Voice: “Luke,” “A River Far Away and Long Ago,” “There You Were, and It Was Like Spring”
    Five Points: “Visiting the Graveyard,” “Night Herons,” “Red”
    Onearth: “Straight Talk from Fox,” “Winter and the Nuthatch,” “Showing the Birds”
    Orion: “Boundaries”
    Parabola: “There Is a Place Beyond Ambition,” “Not This, Not That”
    Portland Magazine: “This Day, and Probably Tomorrow Also,” “Of Goodness”
    Reflections (Yale Divinity School): “The Teachers,” “Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears Trying to Survive on the Melting Ice Floes”
    Shenandoah: “Red Bird”
    The Southern Review: “With the Blackest of Inks,” “Invitation,” “The Orchard,” “In the Evening, in the Pinewoods”
    Spiritus: “Night and the River”

Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
www.beacon.org
    Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
    © 2008 by Mary Oliver
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
    13 12 11 10 09  8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
    This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oliver, Mary
  Red bird : poems / by Mary Oliver.
  p. cm.
  eISBN: 978-0-8070-9772-4
  I. Title.
  PS3565.L5R43 2008
  811’.54—dc22
  2007035357
    v3.0