The Swan 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

  The Truro Bear and Other Poems

  Evidence

  PROSE

  A Poetry Handbook

  Blue Pastures

  Rules for the Dance

  Winter Hours

  Long Life

  Our World (with photographs by Molly Malone Cook)

  AUDIO

  At Blackwater Pond

  Many Miles

  For Anne Taylor

  CONTENTS

  What Can I Say

  Of Time

  On the Beach

  How Perfectly

  How I Go to the Woods

  A Fox in the Dark

  Just Around the House, Early in the Morning

  Tom Dancer’s Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone

  Passing the Unworked Field

  For Example

  Percy Wakes Me (Fourteen)

  Today

  Swan

  Beans Green and Yellow

  It Is Early

  How Many Days

  More of the Unfinishable Fox Story

  The Riders

  The Poet Dreams of the Classroom

  Dancing in Mexico

  The Sweetness of Dogs (Fifteen)

  Bird in the Pepper Tree

  In Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama

  April

  Torn

  Wind in the Pines

  The Living Together

  We Cannot Know

  The Poet Dreams of the Mountain

  Mist in the Morning, Nothing Around Me but Sand and Roses

  The Last Word About Fox (Maybe)

  How Heron Comes

  When

  Trees

  In Your Hands

  I Own a House

  I Worried

  Lark Ascending

  Don’t Hesitate

  In the Darkness

  Four Sonnets

  Trying to Be Thoughtful in the First Brights of Dawn

  More Evidence

  Whispered Poem

  The Poet Is Told to Fill Up More Pages

  AFTERWORD

  Percy

  Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.

  And we also once. Never again. But this having been

  once, although only once, to have been of the earth,

  seems irrevocable.

  —Rilke, Duino Elegies

  ’Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live.

  —Emerson, Beauty

  What Can I Say

  What can I say that I have not said before?

  So I’ll say it again.

  The leaf has a song in it.

  Stone is the face of patience.

  Inside the river there is an unfinishable story

  and you are somewhere in it

  and it will never end until all ends.

  Take your busy heart to the art museum and the

  chamber of commerce

  but take it also to the forest.

  The song you heard singing in the leaf when you

  were a child

  is singing still.

  I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,

  and the leaf is singing still.

  Of Time

  Don’t even ask how rapidly the hummingbird

  lives his life.

  You can’t imagine. A thousand flowers a day,

  a little sleep, then the same again, then

  he vanishes.

  I adore him.

  Yet I adore also the drowse of mountains.

  And in the human world, what is time?

  In my mind there is Rumi, dancing.

  There is Li Po drinking from the winter stream.

  There is Hafiz strolling through Shariz, his feet

  loving the dust.

  On the Beach

  On the beach, at dawn:

  four small stones clearly

  hugging each other.

  How many kinds of love

  might there be in the world,

  and how many formations might they make

  and who am I ever

  to imagine I could know

  such a marvelous business?

  When the sun broke

  it poured willingly its light

  over the stones

  that did not move, not at all,

  just as, to its always generous term,

  it shed its light on me,

  my own body that loves,

  equally, to hug another body.

  How Perfectly

  How perfectly

  and neatly

  opens the pink rose

  this bright morning,

  the sun warm

  on my shoulders,

  its heat

  on the opening petals.

  Possibly

  it is the smallest,

  the least important event

  at this moment

  in the whole world.

  Yet I stand there,

  utterly happy.

  How I Go to the Woods

  Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single

  friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore

  unsuitable.

  I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds

  or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of

  praying, as you no doubt have yours.

  Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit

  on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,

  until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost

  unhearable sound of the roses singing.

  If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love

  you very much.

  A Fox in the Dark

  A fox goes by

  in the headlights

  like an electric shock.

  Then he pauses

  at the edge of the road

  and the heart, if it is still alive,

  feels something—

  a yearning

  for which we have no name

  but which we may remember,

  years later,

  in the darkness,

  upon some other empty road.

  Just Around the House, Early in the Morning

  Though I have been scorned for it,

  let me never be afraid to use the word beautiful.

  For within is the shining leaf

  and the blossoms of the geranium at the window.

  And the eyes of the happy puppy as he wakes.

  The colors of the old and beloved afghan lying

  by itself, on the couch, in the morning sun.

  The hummingbird’s nest perched now in a

  corner of the bookshelf, in front of so many

  books of so many colors.

  The two poached eggs. The buttered toast.

  The ream of brand-new paper just opened,

  white as a block of snow.

  The typewriter humming, ready to go.

  Tom Dancer’s Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone

  You never know

  what opportunity

  is going to travel to you,

 
or through you.

  Once a friend gave me

  a small pine cone—

  one of a few

  he found in the scat

  of a grizzly

  in Utah maybe,

  or Wyoming.

  I took it home

  and did what I supposed

  he was sure I would do—

  I ate it,

  thinking

  how it had traveled

  through that rough

  and holy body.

  It was crisp and sweet.

  It was almost a prayer

  without words.

  My gratitude

  to you, Tom Dancer,

  for this gift of the world

  I adore so much

  and want to belong to.

  And thank you too, great bear.

  Passing the Unworked Field

  Queen Anne’s lace

  is hardly

  prized but

  all the same it isn’t

  idle look

  how it

  stands straight on its

  thin stems how it

  scrubs its white faces

  with the

  rags of the sun how it

  makes all the

  loveliness

  it can.

  For Example

  Okay, the broken gull let me lift it

  from the sand.

  Let me fumble it into a box, with the

  lid open.

  Okay, I put the box into my car and started

  up the highway

  to the place where sometimes, sometimes not,

  such things can be mended.

  The gull at first was quiet.

  How everything turns out one way or another, I

  won’t call it good or bad, just

  one way or another.

  Then the gull lurched from the box and onto

  the back of the front seat and

  punched me.

  Okay, a little blood slid down.

  But we all know, don’t we, how sometimes

  things have to feel anger, so as not

  to be defeated?

  I love this world, even in its hard places.

  A bird too must love this world,

  even in its hard places.

  So, even if the effort may come to nothing,

  you have to do something.

  It was, generally speaking, a perfectly beautiful

  summer morning.

  The gull beat the air with its good wing.

  I kept my eyes on the road.

  Percy Wakes Me (Fourteen)

  Percy wakes me and I am not ready.

  He has slept all night under the covers.

  Now he’s eager for action: a walk, then breakfast.

  So I hasten up. He is sitting on the kitchen counter

  where he is not supposed to be.

  How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you

  needed me,

  to wake me.

  He thought he would hear a lecture and deeply

  his eyes begin to shine.

  He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.

  He squirms and squeals; he has done something

  that he needed

  and now he hears that it is okay.

  I scratch his ears, I turn him over

  and touch him everywhere. He is

  wild with the okayness of it. Then we walk, then

  he has breakfast, and he is happy.

  This is a poem about Percy.

  This is a poem about more than Percy.

  Think about it.

  Today

  Today is a day of

  dark clouds and slow rain.

  The little blades of corn

  are so happy.

  Swan

  Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?

  Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air,

  an armful of white blossoms,

  a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned

  into the bondage of its wings: a snowbank, a bank of lilies,

  biting the air with its black beak?

  Did you hear it, fluting and whistling

  a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees,

  like a waterfall

  knifing down the black ledges?

  And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—

  a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet

  like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light

  of the river?

  And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

  And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

  And have you changed your life?

  Beans Green and Yellow

  In fall

  it is mushrooms

  gathered from dampness

  under the pines;

  in spring

  I have known

  the taste of the lamb

  full of milk

  and spring grass;

  today

  it is beans green and yellow

  and lettuce and basil

  from my friends’ garden—

  how calmly,

  as though it were an ordinary thing,

  we eat the blessed earth.

  It Is Early

  It is early, still the darkest of the dark.

  And already I have killed (in exasperation)

  two mosquitoes and (inadvertently)

  one spider.

  All the same, the sun will rise

  in its sweeps of pink and red clouds.

  Not for me does it rise and not in haste does it rise

  but step by step, neither

  with exasperation nor inadvertently, and not with

  any intended attention to

  any one thing, but to all, like a god

  that takes its instructions from another, even greater,

  whose name, even, we do not know. The one

  that made the mosquito, and the spider; the one

  that made me as I am: easy to exasperation, then penitent.

  How Many Days

  How many days I lived and had never used

  the holy words.

  Tenderly I began them when it came to me

  to want to, oh mystery irrefutable!

  Then I went out of that place

  and into a field and lay down

  among the weeds and the grasses,

  whispering to them, fast, in order to keep

  that world also.

  More of the Unfinishable Fox Story

  And what did the fox look like?

  Like some prince in a fairy tale,

  in his secret costume.

  What was he looking for?

  For a rabbit to fall out of the stars

  and into the grass.

  Was he combed and curly, did he

  wear a prince’s crown?

  No, he was rough and smelled of skunk.

  But he was beautiful,

  and beauty is not to be taken lightly.

  Did you stop the car?

  No, I kept on going to wherever it was I was going,

  which I don’t remember.

  Well, what do you remember?

  The fox! the fox!

  The Riders

  When the Pony Express needed

  riders, it advertised

  a preference for orphans—

  that way, no one was likely

  to ask questions when the carriers failed

  to arrive, or the frightened ponies

  stumbled in with their dead

  from the flanks of the prairies.

  This detail from our country’s past

  has no particular significance—it is only

  a footnote. There were plenty

  of orphans and the point of course

  was to get the mail through, so the theory

  was sound
. And besides,

  think of those rough, lean boys—

  how light and hard they would ride

  fleeing the great loneliness.

  The Poet Dreams of the Classroom

  I dreamed

  I stood up in class

  and I said aloud:

  Teacher,

  why is algebra important?

  Sit down, he said.

  Then I dreamed

  I stood up

  and I said:

  Teacher, I’m weary of the turkeys

  that we have to draw every fall.

  May I draw a fox instead?

  Sit down, he said.

  Then I dreamed

  I stood up once more and said:

  Teacher,

  my heart is falling asleep

  and it wants to wake up.

  It needs to be outside.

  Sit down, he said.

  Dancing in Mexico

  Not myself,

  but Maria,

  who, when her work is done,

  tunes in the radio,

  goes out into the garden,

  picks up the front feet of the little dog Ricky,

  and dances. She dances.

  The Sweetness of Dogs (Fifteen)

  What do you say, Percy? I am thinking

  of sitting out on the sand to watch

  the moon rise. Full tonight.

  So we go

  and the moon rises, so beautiful it

  makes me shudder, makes me think about

  time and space, makes me take

  measure of myself: one iota

  pondering heaven. Thus we sit,

  I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s

  perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich

  it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,

  leans against me and gazes up into

  my face. As though I were

  his perfect moon.

  Bird in the Pepper Tree

  Don’t mind my inexplicable delight