Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver,

I've read your swan song:

full of joy,

joy, joy

in every thing.

I read too late last night

and woke to another sore throat.

I fed the cats and drank coffee.

I sit writing at a window,

two day's snow in the window box

reaching to the second bar

of the child proofed windows

and the tree in the courtyard,

its dessicated pods

tenacious to spite the wind.

The half finished building

across the way obstructs the view:

one year and six months

I'd watched the trucks of 125th. Street

Postal Station back in and out,

the workers on their union breaks.

I am a free lance.

That was the dream,

wasn't it?

Not far off.

I'd imagined more squalor.

More despair.

Cheaper rent,

more downtown?

A smaller place,

certainly.

Beer.

I imagined us together,

skinny and desperate,

ageless in my teenage fantasy,

her my only connection to an adult future,

lost and found,

what some call fate.

That was the dream.

And now this:

a free lance.

Imagine:

the romance of it all,

the poetry, the food,

all of it.

"In five years,

he'll be twenty seven,"

my ex-girlfriend's

Grandmother had said.

In two months,

I'll be twenty seven.

This may be a quarter life crisis--

a social phenomenon

for the new millennium,

years to go,

before my swan song.

I read late into the night

and wake,

with sore throat,

to feed the cats,

and try to write,

and to find that joy,

in this life,

in this place.