Free A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver Page A

had
    had shoulders. The eyes were still
    looking around, I don’t know what
    they were thinking.
    The chickens ate all the crickets.
    The foxes ate all the chickens.
    I ate the fish.

EXTENDING THE AIRPORT RUNWAY
    The good citizens of the commission
    cast their votes
    for more of everything.
    Very early in the morning
    I go out
    to the pale dunes, to look over
    the empty spaces
    of the wilderness.
    For something is there,
    something is there when nothing is there but itself,
    that is not there when anything else is.
    Alas,
    the good citizens of the commission
    have never seen it,
    whatever it is,
    formless, yet palpable.
    Very shining, very delicate.
    Very rare.

TIDES
    Every day the sea
    blue gray green lavender
    pulls away leaving the harbor’s
    dark-cobbled undercoat
    slick and rutted and worm-riddled, the gulls
    walk there among old whalebones, the white
    spines of fish blink from the strandy stew
    as the hours tick over; and then
    far out the faint, sheer
    line turns, rustling over the slack,
    the outer bars, over the green-furred flats, over
    the clam beds, slippery logs,
    barnacle-studded stones, dragging
    the shining sheets forward, deepening,
    pushing, wreathing together
    wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures
    spilling over themselves, lapping
    blue gray green lavender, never
    resting, not ever but fashioning shore,
    continent, everything.
    And here you may find me
    on almost any morning
    walking along the shore so
    light-footed so casual.

OUT OF THE STUMP ROT, SOMETHING
    Out of the stump rot
    something
    glides forward
    that is not a rope,
    unless a rope has eyes,
    lips,
    tongue like a smack of smoke,
    body without shoulders.
    Thus: the black snake
    floating
    over the leaves
    of the old year
    and down to the pond,
    to the green just beginning
    to fuzzle out of the earth,
    also, like smoke.
    If you like a prettiness,
    don’t come here.
    Look at pictures instead,
    or wait for the daffodils.
    This is spring,
    by the rattled pond, in the shambled woods,
    as spring has always been
    and always will be
    no matter what we do
    in the suburbs.
    The matted fur,
    the red blood,
    the bats unshuttering
    their terrible faces,
    and black snake
    gliding across the field
    you think you own.
    Long neck, long tail.
    Tongue on fire.
    Heart of stone.

IN OUR WOODS, SOMETIMES A RARE MUSIC
    Every spring
    I hear the thrush singing
    in the glowing woods
    he is only passing through.
    His voice is deep,
    then he lifts it until it seems
    to fall from the sky.
    I am thrilled.
    I am grateful.
    Then, by the end of morning,
    he’s gone, nothing but silence
    out of the tree
    where he rested for a night.
    And this I find acceptable.
    Not enough is a poor life.
    But too much is, well, too much.
    Imagine Verdi or Mahler
    every day, all day.
    It would exhaust anyone.

THE MORNING PAPER
    Read one newspaper daily (the morning edition
    is the best
    for by evening you know that you at least
    have lived through another day)
    and let the disasters, the unbelievable
    yet approved decisions,
    soak in.
    I don’t need to name the countries,
    ours among them.
    What keeps us from falling down, our faces
    to the ground; ashamed, ashamed?

THE POET COMPARES HUMAN NATURE
TO THE OCEAN FROM WHICH WE CAME
    The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth,
    it can lie down like silk breathing
    or toss havoc shoreward; it can give
    gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth
    like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can
    sweet-talk entirely. As I can too,
    and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

ON TRAVELING TO BEAUTIFUL PLACES
    Every day I’m still looking for God
    and I’m still finding him everywhere,
    in the dust, in the flowerbeds.
    Certainly in the oceans,
    in the islands that lay in the distance
    continents of ice, countries of sand
    each with its own set of creatures
    and God, by whatever name.
    How perfect to be aboard a ship with
    maybe a hundred years still in my pocket.
    But it’s late, for all of us,
    and in truth the only ship there is
    is the ship we