Free The Truro Bear and Other Adventures by Mary Oliver Page B

together
can talk together,
for I thought, what else could it be?
And even though what emerged
were two young women, two-legged for sure
and not at all aware of me,
their nimble, young women tongues
telling and answering,
and though I knew
I had believed something probably not true,
yet it was wonderful
to have believed it.
And it has stayed with me
as a present once given is forever given.
Easy and happy they sounded,
those two maidens of the wilderness
from which we have—
who knows to what furious, pitiful extent—
banished ourselves.

Turtle
    Now I see it—
it nudges with its bulldog head
the slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble;
and now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal
    who is leading her soft children
from one side of the pond to the other; she keeps
close to the edge
and they follow closely, the good children—
    the tender children,
the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet
into the darkness.
And now will come—I can count on it—the murky splash,
    the certain victory
of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic
circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks
flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart
    will be most mournful
on their account. But, listen,
what’s important?
Nothing’s important
    except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,
of which this is a part,
not be denied. Once,
I happened to see, on a city street, in summer,
    a dusty, fouled turtle plodding along—
a snapper—
broken out I suppose from some backyard cage—
and I knew what I had to do—
    I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it—
I put it, like a small mountain range,
into a knapsack, and I took it out
of the city, and I let it
    down into the dark pond, into
the cool water,
and the light of the lilies,
to live.

The Other Kingdoms
    Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.

Swimming with Otter
    I am watching otter, how he
    plays in the water, how he
        displays brave underside to the
            wave-washings, how he
    breathes in descent trailing sudden
    strings of pearls that tell
        almost, but never quite, where he is
            apt to rise—how he is
    gone, gone, so long I despair of him, then he
    trims, wetly, up the far shore and if he
        looks back he is surely
            laughing. I too have taken
    my self into this
    summer lake, where the leaves of the trees
        almost touch, where peace comes
            in the generosity of water, and I have
    reached out into the loveliness and I have
    floated on my flat back to think out
        a poem or two, not by any means fluid but,
            dear God, as you have made me, my only quickness.

Black Snake
    I startled a young black snake: he
flew over the grass and hid his face
    under a leaf, the rest of him in plain sight.
Little brother, often I’ve done the same.

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods
    I’d seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night
    under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I
    got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under
    the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even
    nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.
    This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them—I swear it!—
    would have come to my