Dream Work Read online

  DREAM

  WORK

  BOOKS BY MARY OLIVER

  American Primitive

  Twelve Moons

  The River Styx, Ohio and Other Poems

  No Voyage and Other Poems

  CHAPBOOKS

  Sleeping in the Forest

  The Night Traveler

  DREAM

  WORK

  Mary

  Oliver

  THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

  NEW YORK

  Copyright © 1986 by Mary Oliver

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Oliver, Mary, 1935–

  Dream work.

  I. Title

  PS3565.L5D74 1986811'.5486-7656

  ISBN-13: 978-0-80219-241-7

  Design by Dede Cummings

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  0607080910302928272625242322

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  CONTENTS

  Note to Reader

  PART I

  Dogfish

  Morning Poem

  The Chance to Love Everything

  Trilliums

  Rage

  Wild Geese

  Knife

  Shadows

  Dreams

  The River

  Consequences

  Robert Schumann

  Clamming

  The Fire

  Banyan

  Whispers

  Driving Through the Wind River Reservation: A Poem of Black Bear

  Members of the Tribe

  Starfish

  The Journey

  A Visitor

  The House

  Stanley Kunitz

  PART II

  Orion

  One or Two Things

  Poem

  Marsh Hawks

  Bowing to the Empress

  The Turtle

  Sunrise

  Two Kinds of Deliverance

  The Swimmer

  Milkweed

  The Waves

  Landscape

  The Shark

  Storm in Massachusetts, September 1982

  Acid

  Black Snakes

  The Moths

  At Sea

  1945–1985: Poem for the Anniversary

  At Loxahatchie

  Coming Home

  The Sunflowers

  Acknowledgments

  I

  DOGFISH

  Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing

  kept flickering in with the tide

  and looking around.

  Black as a fisherman’s boot,

  with a white belly.

  If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile

  under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,

  which was rough

  as a thousand sharpened nails.

  And you know

  what a smile means,

  don’t you?

  I wanted

  the past to go away, I wanted

  to leave it, like another country; I wanted

  my life to close, and open

  like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song

  where it falls

  down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;

  I wanted

  to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

  whoever I was, I was

  alive

  for a little while.

  It was evening, and no longer summer.

  Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,

  huddled in the highest ripples

  as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body

  one gesture, one black sleeve

  that could fit easily around

  the bodies of three small fish.

  Also I wanted

  to be able to love. And we all know

  how that one goes,

  don’t we?

  Slowly

  the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

  You don’t want to hear the story

  of my life, and anyway

  I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

  to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

  And anyway it’s the same old story —

  a few people just trying,

  one way or another,

  to survive.

  Mostly, I want to be kind.

  And nobody, of course, is kind,

  or mean,

  for a simple reason.

  And nobody gets out of it, having to

  swim through the fires to stay in

  this world.

  And look! look! look! I think those little fish

  better wake up and dash themselves away

  from the hopeless future that is

  bulging toward them.

  And probably,

  if they don’t waste time

  looking for an easier world,

  they can do it.

  MORNING POEM

  Every morning

  the world

  is created.

  Under the orange

  sticks of the sun

  the heaped

  ashes of the night

  turn into leaves again

  and fasten themselves to the high branches —

  and the ponds appear

  like black cloth

  on which are painted islands

  of summer lilies.

  If it is your nature

  to be happy

  you will swim away along the soft trails

  for hours, your imagination

  alighting everywhere.

  And if your spirit

  carries within it

  the thorn

  that is heavier than lead —

  if it’s all you can do

  to keep on trudging —

  there is still

  somewhere deep within you

  a beast shouting that the earth

  is exactly what it wanted —

  each pond with its blazing lilies

  is a prayer heard and answered

  lavishly,

  every morning,

  whether or not


  you have ever dared to be happy,

  whether or not

  you have ever dared to pray.

  THE CHANCE TO LOVE EVERYTHING

  All summer I made friends

  with the creatures nearby —

  they flowed through the fields

  and under the tent walls,

  or padded through the door,

  grinning through their many teeth,

  looking for seeds,

  suet, sugar; mutttering and humming,

  opening the breadbox, happiest when

  there was milk and music. But once

  in the night I heard a sound

  outside the door, the canvas

  bulged slightly — something

  was pressing inward at eye level.

  I watched, trembling, sure I had heard

  the click of claws, the smack of lips

  outside my gauzy house —

  I imagined the red eyes,

  the broad tongue, the enormous lap.

  Would it be friendly too?

  Fear defeated me. And yet,

  not in faith and not in madness

  but with the courage I thought

  my dream deserved,

  I stepped outside. It was gone.

  Then I whirled at the sound of some

  shambling tonnage.

  Did I see a black haunch slipping

  back through the trees? Did I see

  the moonlight shining on it?

  Did I actually reach out my arms

  toward it, toward paradise falling, like

  the fading of the dearest, wildest hope —

  the dark heart of the story that is all

  the reason for its telling?

  TRILLIUMS

  Every spring

  among

  the ambiguities

  of childhood

  the hillsides grew white

  with the wild trilliums.

  I believed in the world.

  Oh, I wanted

  to be easy

  in the peopled kingdoms,

  to take my place there,

  but there was none

  that I could find

  shaped like me.

  So I entered

  through the tender buds,

  I crossed the cold creek,

  my backbone

  and my thin white shoulders

  unfolding and stretching.

  From the time of snow-melt,

  when the creek roared

  and the mud slid

  and the seeds cracked,

  I listened to the earth-talk,

  the root-wrangle,

  the arguments of energy,

  the dreams lying

  just under the surface,

  then rising,

  becoming

  at the last moment

  flaring and luminous —

  the patient parable

  of every spring and hillside

  year after difficult year.

  RAGE

  You are the dark song

  of the morning;

  serious and slow,

  you shave, you dress,

  you descend the stairs

  in your public clothes

  and drive away, you become

  the wise and powerful one

  who makes all the days

  possible in the world.

  But you were also the red song

  in the night,

  stumbling through the house

  to the child’s bed,

  to the damp rose of her body,

  leaving your bitter taste.

  And forever those nights snarl

  the delicate machinery of the days.

  When the child’s mother smiles

  you see on her cheekbones

  a truth you will never confess;

  and you see how the child grows —

  timidly, crouching in corners.

  Sometimes in the wide night

  you hear the most mournful cry,

  a ravished and terrible moment.

  In your dreams she’s a tree

  that will never come to leaf —

  in your dreams she’s a watch

  you dropped on the dark stones

  till no one could gather the fragments —

  in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,

  and dreams do not lie.

  WILD GEESE

  You do not have to be good.

  You do not have to walk on your knees

  for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

  You only have to let the soft animal of your body

  love what it loves.

  Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

  Meanwhile the world goes on.

  Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

  are moving across the landscapes,

  over the prairies and the deep trees,

  the mountains and the rivers.

  Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

  are heading home again.

  Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

  the world offers itself to your imagination,

  calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

  over and over announcing your place

  in the family of things.

  KNIFE

  Something

  just now

  moved through my heart

  like the thinnest of blades

  as that red-tail pumped

  once with its great wings

  and flew above the gray, cracked

  rock wall.

  It wasn’t

  about the bird, it was

  something about the way

  stone stays

  mute and put, whatever

  goes flashing by.

  Sometimes,

  when I sit like this, quiet,

  all the dreams of my blood

  and all outrageous divisions of time

  seem ready to leave,

  to slide out of me.

  Then, I imagine, I would never move.

  By now

  the hawk has flown five miles

  at least,

  dazzling whoever else has happened

  to look up.

  I was dazzled. But that

  wasn’t the knife.

  It was the sheer, dense wall

  of blind stone

  without a pinch of hope

  or a single unfulfilled desire

  sponging up and reflecting,

  so brilliantly,

  as it has for centuries,

  the sun’s fire.

  SHADOWS

  Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast

  terrible shadows, that each of the so-called

  senseless acts has its thread looping

  back through the world and into a human heart.

  And meanwhile

  the gold-trimmed thunder

  wanders the sky; the river

  may be filling the cellars of the sleeping town.

  Cyclone, fire, and their merry cousins

  bring us to grief — but these are the hours

  with the old wooden-god faces;

  we lift them to our shoulders like so many

  black coffins, we continue walking

  into the future. I don’t mean

  there are no bodies in the river,

  or bones broken by the wind. I mean

  everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar

  of the tornado swears there was no mention ever

  of any person, or reason — I mean

  the waters rise without any plot upon

  history, or even geography. Whatever

  power of the earth rampages, we turn to it

  dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever

  the name of the catastrophe, it is never

  the opposite of love.

  DREAMS

/>   All night

  the dark buds of dreams

  open

  richly.

  In the center

  of every petal

  is a letter,

  and you imagine

  if you could only remember

  and string them all together

  they would spell the answer.

  It is a long night,

  and not an easy one —

  you have so many branches,

  and there are diversions —

  birds that come and go,

  the black fox that lies down

  to sleep beneath you,

  the moon staring

  with her bone-white eye.

  Finally you have spent

  all the energy you can

  and you drag from the ground

  the muddy skirt of your roots

  and leap awake

  with two or three syllables

  like water in your mouth

  and a sense

  of loss — a memory

  not yet of a word,

  certainly not yet the answer —

  only how it feels

  when deep in the tree

  all the locks click open,

  and the fire surges through the wood,

  and the blossoms blossom.

  THE RIVER

  In one day the Amazon discharges into the Atlantic the equivalent of New York City’s water supply for nine years.

  — New York Times

  Just because I was born

  precisely here or there,

  in some cold city or other,

  don’t think I don’t remember

  how I came along like a grain

  carried by the flood

  on one of the weedy threads that pour

  toward a muddy lightning,

  surging east, past

  monkeys and parrots, past

  trees with their branches in the clouds, until

  I was spilled forth

  and slept under the blue lung

  of the Caribbean.

  Nobody

  told me this. But little by little

  the smell of mud and leaves returned to me,

  and in dreams I began to turn,

  to sense the current.