Author Archives: virtualartistaltar

Sep7

true involvement

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Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

A Dream of Trees
by Mary Oliver

There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company.
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.

There is a thing in me still dreams of trees,
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world’s artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.

I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?

Sep6

how it feels

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Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

Dreams
by Mary Oliver

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.

Sep5

miraculously kind

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Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

HAPPINESS
by Mary Oliver

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

Sep4

instinct and imagination

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Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

The Spirit Likes To Dress Up
by Mary Oliver

The spirit likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders, and all the rest,
at night in the black branches,
in the morning in the blue branches of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world, instinct and imagination,
and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light that burns
where no one is –
so it enters us – in the morning,
shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning;
and at night lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body like a star.

Sep3

seven dancers floating

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Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

Seven White Butterflies
By Mary Oliver

Seven white butterflies
delicate in a hurry look
how they bang the pages
of their wings as they fly
to the fields of mustard yellow
and orange and plain
gold all eternity
is in the moment this is what
Blake said Whitman said such
wisdom in the agitated
motions of the mind seven
dancers floating
even as worms toward
paradise see how they banter
and riot and rise
to the trees flutter
lob their white bodies into
the invisible wind weightless
lacy willing
to deliver themselves unto
the universe now each settles
down on a yellow thumb on a
grassy stem now
all seven are rapidly sipping
from the golden towers who
would have thought it could be so easy?

That cost me one question mark.

Sep2

the light spilling

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Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks
By Mary Oliver

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled—
I’m wading along

in the sunlight—
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead—
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon—
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from—
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind—

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage—
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

Aug31

moon snails

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Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

Breakage
Mary Oliver

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Aug30

slowing down for happiness

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Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

Coming Home
by Mary Oliver

When we are driving in the dark,
on the long road to Provincetown,
when we are weary,
when the buildings and the scrub pines lose their familiar look,
I imagine us rising from the speeding car.
I imagine us seeing everything from another place–
the top of one of the pale dunes, or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea.
And what we see is a world that cannot cherish us,
but which we cherish.
And what we see is our life moving like that
along the dark edges of everything,
headlights sweeping the blackness,
believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.
Looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me.

Aug29

in love with life

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Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

SELF-PORTRAIT
by Mary Oliver

I wish I was twenty and in love with life
and still full of beans.

Onward, old legs!
There are the long, pale dunes; on the other side
the roses are blooming and finding their labor
no adversity to the spirit.

Upward, old legs! There are the roses, and there is the sea
shining like a song, like a body
I want to touch

though I’m not twenty
and won’t be again but ah! seventy. And still
in love with life. And still
full of beans.

Aug28

a miracle

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Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

This Morning
By Mary Oliver

This morning the redbirds’ eggs

have hatched and already the chicks

are chirping for food. They don’t

know where it’s coming from, they

just keep shouting, “More! More!”

As to anything else, they haven’t

had a single thought. Their eyes

haven’t yet opened, they know nothing

about the sky that’s waiting. Or

the thousands, the millions of trees.

They don’t even know they have wings.

And just like that, like a simple

neighborhood event, a miracle

is taking place.