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.

Boxing Day

The new decade

upon us,

shades of slate

in our victories

and our losses.

We dream of escape;

there is none.

I hear house sounds

in your absence.

Snowplows,

like thunder,

through the whiteness

that penetrates deeper

still.

The shadow moves with us,

our forever thread,

woven once more,

and still dreaming

we become entwined.

I wake to new life,

your breath upon me.

The house

breathes

in your absence.

It carries me.

Wind, rushing past,

my body alive.

Test pattern static,

keeping the time.

The house breathes,

whispering in your absence,

the clanging pipes,

the hiss of the radiator,

the cold streets,

my hand upon the window pane.

Total Eclipse (Solstice 2010)

We were compelled by the facts

of the night:

first total lunar eclipse

in four hundred years,

last in over a hundred,

to occur on this day--

the winter solstice,

the full moon and the earth

tilted as far as possible

from the sun.

This night,

I promised

I would stay up

in observance

for the first time,

having watched a documentary

on Nova about Stonehenge,

having written about my connection

to the indigenous of the Carribean,

wanting to feel connected again

through the path of moon through sky,

north and south and west again,

slight penumbral darkening.

I leaned my head

against the glass,

the cold from outside,

as earth's shadow edged

incrementally

between sun and moon,

determined at the moment

of total eclipse to stand

between the sun behind me

and the moon in front

drawing whatever power

my ancestors had

over this event,

this perfect alignment,

assuming the rightness of the moment,

the direction given,

the path ahead.

In mid morning,

the sky dark,

the moon reddened,

finally,

I watched it pass

behind cloud cover,

head pressed against glass

looking further out,

the moon nearly lost

to the west,

dull red, gauzy moon,

and made my way

bed ways

hope in the

fading moon,

red behind the clouds

until dawn.