The Swan by Mary Oliver Page A

everything.
    Do you give a thought now and again to the
essential sparrow, the necessary toad?
    Just as truly as the earth is ours, we belong
to it. The tissue of our minds is made of it,
and the soles of our feet, as fully as the
tiger’s claw, the branch of the whitebark pine,
the voices of the birds, the dog-tooth violet
and the tooth of the dog.
    Have you ever seen a squirrel swim? I have.
    Is it not incredible, that in the acorn something
has hidden an entire tree?
    “For there is nothing that grows or lives that
can approach the feathery grace, the symmetry
of form, or the lacy elegance of pattern of the
Ferns: and to be blind to all this beauty is
nothing less than calamitous.”
    In Australia there is a cloud called The
Morning Glory.
    Okay, I confess to wanting to make a literature
of praise.
2.
    Where are you when you’re not thinking?
    Frightening, isn’t it?
    Where are you when you’re not feeling anything?
    Oh, worse!
    Except for faith and imagination, nature is that
hard fortress you can’t get out of.
    Some persons are captive to love, others would
make the beloved a captive. Which one are you?
    I think I have not lived a single hour of my life
by calculation.
    There are in this world a lot of devils with wondrous
smiles. Also, many unruly angels.
    The life of the body is, I suppose, along with
everything else, a lesson. I mean, if lessons are
what you look for.
    Faith: this is the engine of my head, my breast
bone, my toes.
3.
    It is salvation if one can step forth from the
clutter of one’s mind into that open space—
that almost holy space—called work.
    Emerson: how the elegance of his language can
make me weep over my own inadequacy.
    Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
    Or, how sweet just to say of a great, burly
man: he’s a honey.
    Or of the fox: his neat trot. The donkey, his
sorrowful plodding. The cheetah: his clean leap.
The alligator: his lunge.
    Do you hear the rustle and outcry on the page?
Do you hear its longing?
    Words are too wonderful for words. The vibrant
translation of things to ideas. Hello there.
My best greetings to you.
    Lord, there are so many fires, so many words, in
my heart. It’s going to take something I can’t
even imagine, to put them all out.
4.
    Let laughter come to you now and again, that
sturdy friend.
    The impulse to leap off the cliff, when the
body falsely imagines it might fly, may be
restrained by reason, also by modesty. Of the
two possibilities, take your choice, and live.
    Refuse all cooperation with the heart’s death.
5.
    Sing, if you can sing, and if not still be
musical inside yourself.

Whispered Poem
    I have been risky in my endeavors,
    I have been steadfast in my loves;
    Oh Lord, consider these when you judge me.

The Poet Is Told to Fill Up More Pages
    But, where are the words?
    Not in my pocket.
    Not in the refrigerator.
    Not in my savings account.
    So I sit, harassed, with my notebook.
    It’s a joke, really, and not a good one.
    For fun I try a few commands myself.
    I say to the rain, stop raining.
    I say to the sun, that isn’t anywhere nearby,
    Come back, and come fast.
    Nothing happens.
    So this is all I can give you,
    not being the maker of what I do,
    but only the one that holds the pencil.
    abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.
    Make of it what you will.

AFTERWORD
    Percy
    (2002–2009)
    This—I said to Percy when I had left
our bed and gone
    out onto the living room couch where
    he found me apparently doing nothing—this
is called
thinking
.
    It’s something people do,
    not being entirely children of the earth,
like a dog or a tree or a flower.
    His eyes questioned such an activity.
    Well, okay, he said. If you say so. Whatever
    it is. Actually
I like kissing better.
    And next to me,
    tucked down his curly head
    and, sweet as a flower, slept.

NOTES
    The Rilke epigraph is from the Ninth Elegy,
translation by C. F. MacIntyre.
    The last line of the poem titled “Swan”
remembers the final sentence of Rilke’s
poem “Archaic Torso