The Truro Bear and Other Adventures Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY MARY OLIVER

  POETRY

  No Voyage and Other Poems

  The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems

  Twelve Moons

  American Primitive

  Dream Work

  House of Light

  New and Selected Poems Volume One

  White Pine

  West Wind

  The Leaf and the Cloud

  What Do We Know

  Owls and Other Fantasies

  Why I Wake Early

  Blue Iris

  New and Selected Poems Volume Two

  Thirst

  Red Bird

  CHAPBOOKS AND SPECIAL EDITIONS

  The Night Traveler

  Sleeping in the Forest

  Provincetown

  Wild Geese (UK Edition)

  PROSE

  A Poetry Handbook

  Blue Pastures

  Rules for the Dance

  Winter Hours

  Long Life

  Our World (with photographs by Molly Malone Cook)

  CONTENTS

  The Chance to Love Everything

  The Gesture

  Porcupine

  Toad

  One Hundred White-sided Dolphins on a Summer Day

  The Kitten

  Ghosts

  Carrying the Snake to the Garden

  The Opossum

  This Is the One

  At Herring Cove

  Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered

  Turtle

  The Other Kingdoms

  Swimming with Otter

  Black Snake

  Five A.M. in the Pinewoods

  Humpbacks

  Moles

  The Snow Cricket

  Whelks

  A Meeting

  The Gift

  The Truro Bear

  Alligator Poem

  The Hermit Crab

  Hannah’s Children

  Pipefish

  This Too

  Swoon

  How Turtles Come to Spend the Winter in the Aquarium, Then Are Flown South and Released Back Into the Sea

  The Poet Goes to Indiana

  The Summer Day

  Mink

  Percy (One)

  Percy (Two)

  Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night (Three)

  Percy (Four)

  News of Percy (Five)

  Percy (Six)

  Percy (Seven)

  Percy and Books (Eight)

  Percy (Nine)

  I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life (Ten)

  Percy at His Bath, or, Ambivalence (Eleven)

  Percy at Breakfast (Twelve)

  Percy Speaks While I Am Doing Taxes (Thirteen)

  Truth is always veiled in a certain mystery.

  Fabre, The Life of the Fly

  On thy wondrous works I will meditate.

  Psalm 145

  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; muttering 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?

  The Gesture

  On the dog’s ear, a scrap of filmy stuff

  turns out to be

  a walking stick, that jade insect, this one scarcely sprung

  from the pod of the nest,

  not an inch long. I could just see

  the eyes, elbows, feet nimble under the long shanks.

  I could not imagine it could live

  in the brisk world, or where it would live, or how. But

  I took it

  outside and held it up to the red oak that rises

  ninety feet into the air, and it lifted its forward-most

  pair of arms

  with what in anything worth thinking about would have seemed

  a graceful and glad gesture; it caught

  onto the bark, it hung on; it rested; it began to climb.

  Porcupine

  Where

  the porcupine is

  I don’t

  know but I hope

  almost done

  to himself.

  For years I have wanted to see

  that slow rambler,

  it’s high

  up on some pine

  bough in some

  thick tree, maybe

  that thornbush.

  I think, what love does to us

  is a Gordian knot,

  it’s that complicated.

  on the other side

  of the swamp.

  The dogs have come

  running back, one of them

  I hug the dogs

  and their good luck,

  and put on their leashes.

  So dazzling she must be—

  with a single quill

  in his moist nose.

  He’s laughing,

  not knowing what he has

  a plump, dark lady

  wearing a gown of nails—

  white teeth tearing skin

  from the thick tree.

  Toad

  I was walking by. He was sitting there.

  It was full morning, so the heat was heavy on his sand-colored head and his webbed feet. I squatted beside him, at the edge of the path. He didn’t move.

  I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time. The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night. About this cup we call a life. About happiness. And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.

  He looked neither up nor down, which didn’t necessarily mean he was either afraid or asleep. I felt his energy, stored under his tongue perhaps, and behind his bulging eyes.

  I talked about how the world seems to me, five feet tall, the blue sky all around my head. I said, I wondered how it seemed to him, down there, intimate with the dust.

  He might have been Buddha—did not move, blink, or frown, not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes as the refined anguish of language passed over him.

  One Hundred White-sided Dolphins on a Summer Day

  1.

  Fat,

  black, slick,

  galloping in the pitch

  of the waves, in the pearly

  fields of the sea,

  they leap toward us,

  they rise, sparkling, and vanish, and
rise sparkling,

  they breathe little clouds of mist, they lift perpetual smiles,

  they slap their tails on the waves, grandmothers and grandfathers

  enjoying the old jokes,

  they circle around us,

  they swim with us—

  2.

  a hundred white-sided dolphins

  on a summer day,

  each one, as God himself

  could not appear more acceptable

  a hundred times,

  in a body blue and black threading through

  the sea foam,

  and lifting himself up from the opened

  tents of the waves on his fishtail,

  to look

  with the moon of his eye

  into my heart,

  3.

  and find there

  pure, sudden, steep, sharp, painful

  gratitude

  that falls—

  I don’t know—either

  unbearable tons

  or the pale, bearable hand

  of salvation

  on my neck,

  lifting me

  from the boat’s plain plank seat

  into the world’s

  4.

  unspeakable kindness.

  It is my sixty-third summer on earth

  and, for a moment, I have almost vanished

  into the body of the dolphin,

  into the moon-eye of God,

  into the white fan that lies at the bottom of the sea

  with everything

  that ever was, or ever will be,

  supple, wild, rising on flank or fishtail—

  singing or whistling or breathing damply through blowhole

  at top of head. Then, in our little boat, the dolphins suddenly gone,

  we sailed on through the brisk, cheerful day.

  The Kitten

  More amazed than anything

  I took the perfectly black

  stillborn kitten

  with the one large eye

  in the center of its small forehead

  from the house cat’s bed

  and buried it in a field

  behind the house.

  I suppose I could have given it

  to a museum,

  I could have called the local

  newspaper.

  But instead I took it out into the field

  and opened the earth

  and put it back

  saying, it was real,

  saying, life is infinitely inventive,

  saying, what other amazements

  lie in the dark seed of the earth, yes,

  I think I did right to go out alone

  and give it back peacefully, and cover the place

  with the reckless blossoms of weeds.

  Ghosts

  1.

  Have you noticed?

  2.

  Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts

  lay down on the earth and died

  it’s hard to tell now

  what’s bone, and what merely

  was once.

  The golden eagle, for instance,

  has a bit of heaviness in him;

  moreover the huge barns

  seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off

  toward deeper grass.

  3.

  1805

  near the Bitterroot Mountains:

  a man named Lewis kneels down

  on the prairie watching

  a sparrow’s nest cleverly concealed in the wild hyssop

  and lined with buffalo hair. The chicks,

  not more than a day hatched, lean

  quietly into the thick wool as if

  content, after all,

  to have left the perfect world and fallen,

  helpless and blind

  into the flowered fields and the perils

  of this one.

  4.

  In the book of the earth it is written:

  nothing can die.

  In the book of the Sioux it is written:

  they have gone away into the earth to hide.

  Nothing will coax them out again

  but the people dancing.

  5.

  Said the old-timers:

  the tongue

  is the sweetest meat.

  Passengers shooting from train windows

  could hardly miss, they were

  that many.

  Afterward the carcasses

  stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned

  with slopes of white fat,

  black ropes of blood—hellhunks

  in the prairie heat.

  6.

  Have you noticed? how the rain

  falls soft as the fall

  of moccasins. Have you noticed?

  how the immense circles still,

  stubbornly, after a hundred years,

  mark the grass where the rich droppings

  from the roaring bulls

  fell to the earth as the herd stood

  day after day, moon after moon

  in their tribal circle, outwaiting

  the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also

  have you noticed? gone now.

  7.

  Once only, and then in a dream,

  I watched while, secretly

  and with the tenderness of any caring woman,

  a cow gave birth

  to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him

  in a warm corner

  of the clear night

  in the fragrant grass

  in the wild domains

  of the prairie spring, and I asked them,

  in my dream I knelt down and asked them

  to make room for me.

  Carrying the Snake to the Garden

  In the cellar

  was the smallest snake

  I have ever seen.

  It coiled itself

  in a corner

  and watched me

  with eyes

  like two little stars

  set into coal,

  and a tail

  that quivered.

  One step

  of my foot

  and it fled

  like a running shoelace,

  but a scoop of the wrist

  and I had it

  in my hand.

  I was sorry

  for the fear,

  so I hurried

  upstairs and out the kitchen door

  to the warm grass

  and the sunlight

  and the garden.

  It turned and turned

  in my hand

  but when I put it down

  it didn’t move.

  I thought

  it was going to flow

  up my leg

  and into my pocket.

  I thought, for a moment,

  as it lifted its face,

  it was going to sing.

  And then it was gone.

  The Opossum

  Beauty of fox, lemur, panther,

  aardvark, thunder-worm, condor,

  the quagga, the puffer, the kudu,

  and this: the opossum

  with her babies hanging on, gray lumps

  all around the scaly tail

  that was bent over her back, like a sailboat’s boom,

  for the very small and oh! almost human baby-fingers

  to cling to. At first I thought

  it was some pitiful broken thing

  lumping along over the scrubby leaves,

  and then I saw the brown dog-softness of her long-lashed eyes

  as, swiftly, with that wobbling burden of life upon her,

  she ran.

  This Is the One

  The bear

  who shuffles

  over the hillsides

  filling himself

  with berries

  until his tongue is purple

  (which, remember, is

  a royal color)—<
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  the bear

  who circles the cabin,

  who will not steal the honey,

  who will not rifle the knapsack

  of the sleeping camper—

  the one

  who sits by himself

  by the river,

  who sings to himself

  the secret song

  no one has ever heard—

  the bear

  who yawns

  with the cavernous mouth

  of a shaggy god—

  who, when he sees me

  is solidly silent

  and rises

  on the mass of his legs,

  disdainful and free

  as anything on earth

  could ever be—

  this is the bear

  I want to see.

  At Herring Cove

  The edge of the sea shines and glimmers. The tide rises and falls, on ordinary not on stormy days, about nine feet. The beach here is composed of sand and glacial drift; the many-colored pebbles of this drift have been well rounded by the water’s unceasing, manipulative, glassy touch. In addition, all sorts of objects are carried here by the currents, by the galloping waves, and left as the sea on the outgoing tide tumbles back.

  From one tide to the next, and from one year to the next, what do I find here?

  Grapefruit, and orange peel, and onion sacks from the fishing boats; balloons of all colors, with ribbons dangling; beer cans, soft drink cans, plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic bottle caps, feminine hygiene by-products, a few summers ago several hypodermic needles, the odd glove and the odd shoe, plastic glasses, old cigarette lighters, mustard bottles, plastic containers still holding the decomposing bodies of baitfish; fishhooks rusty or still shining, coils of fishline; balls of fishline, one with a razor-billed auk in a death-grip.

  Sea clams, razor clams, mussels holding on with their long beards to stones or each other; a very occasional old oyster and quahog shell; other shells in varying degrees of whiteness: drills, whelks, jingles, slippers, periwinkles, moon snails. Bones of fish, bodies of fish and of skates, pipefish, goosefish, jellyfish, dogfish, starfish, sand dabs; blues or parts of blues or the pink, satiny guts of blues; sand eels in the blackened seaweed, silver, and spackled with salt.

  Dead harbor seal, dead gull, dead merganser, dead gannet with tiny ivory-colored lice crawling over its snowy head and around its aster-blue eyes. Dead dovekie in winter.

  Once, on a summer morning at exact low tide, the skull of a dolphin at the edge of the water. Later the flanged backbone, tail bones, hip bones slide onto the sand and return no more to the gardens of the sea.