“Our love is like a well in the wilderness where time watches over the wandering lightning. Our sleep is a secret tunnel that leads to the scent of apples carried on the wind. When I hold you, I hold everything that is—swans, volcanoes, river rocks, maple trees drinking the fragrance of the moon, bread that the fire adores. In your life I see everything that lives.”
~ Pablo Neruda

Anhelo Su Boca, Su Voz, Su Pelo
By Pablo Neruda

Anhelo su boca, su voz, su pelo.
Silencioso y muerto de hambre, rondo a traves de las calles.
El pan no me alimenta, amanecer me interrumpe,
yo busca todo el dia para la medida líquida de sus pasos.

Tengo hambre de su risa lisa, sus manos el color de una cosecha salvaje, hambre para las piedras palidas de sus unas,
yo deseo comer su piel como una almendra entera.

Deseo comer el rayo de sol que senala por medio de luces en su cuerpo encantador, la nariz soberana de su cara arrogante,
yo deseo comer la cortina efímera de sus latigazos,

y establezco el paso alrededor de hambriento, oliendo el crepúsculo,
caza para usted, para su corazón caliente,
como un puma en los barrens de Quitratue.

I Crave Your Mouth
by Pablo Neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent, starving I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disquiets me,
I search the liquid sound of your steps all day.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
For your hands the color of the wild grain,
I hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your loveliness,
The nose, sovereign of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

And I walk hungry, smelling the twilight
Looking for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barren wilderness.

 

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

 

 

Another Everyday Poem
By Mary Oliver

 

Every day

I consider

the lilies-

how they are dressed-

 

and the ravens-

how they are fed-

and how each of these

is a miracle

 

of Lord-love

and of sorrow-

for the lilies

in their bright dresses

 

cannot last

but wrinkle fast

and fall,

and the little ravens

 

in their windy nest

rise up

in such pleasure

at the sight

 

of fresh meat

that makes their lives sweet-

and what a puzzle it is

that such brevity-

 

the lavish clothes,

the ruddy food-

makes the world

so full, so good.

Summer Story
By Mary Oliver

When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into the funnels

of the blossoms,
and the tongue
leaps out
and throbs,

I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in the world

that aren’t
pieces of gold
or power–
that nobody owns

or could buy even
for a hillside of money–
that just
float about the world,

or drift over the fields,
or into the gardens,
and into the tents of the vines,
and now here I am

spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling,
so that I feel I am myself

a small bird
with a terrible hunger,
with a thin beak probing and dipping
and a heart that races so fast

it is only a heartbeat ahead of breaking–
and I am the hunger and the assuagement,
and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,
and, like them, I am full of delight and shaking.

A Certain Sharpness in the Morning Air
By Mary Oliver

In the morning
it shuffles, unhurried,
across the wet fields
in its black slippers,
in its coal-colored coat
with the white stripe like a river
running down its spine–
a glossy animal with a quick temper
and two bulbs of such diatribe under its tail
that when I see it I pray
not to be noticed–
not to be struck
by the flat boards of its anger–
for the whole haul of its smell
is unendurable–
like tragedy
that can’t be borne,
like death
that has to be buried, or burned–
but a little of it is another story–
for it’s true, isn’t it,
in our world,
that the petals pooled with nectar, and the polished thorns
are a single thing–
that even the purest light, lacking the robe of darkness,
would be without expression–
that love itself, without it’s pain, would be
no more than a shruggable comfort.
Lately, I have noticed, when the skunk’s temper has tilted
in the distance,
and the acids are floating everywhere,
and I am touched, it is all, even in my nostrils and my throat
as the brushing of thorns;
and I stand there
thinking of the old, wild life of the fields, when, as I remember it,
I was shaggy, and beautiful,
like the rose.

Artist
by Drea

Use creativity,
images represent,
meaning inferred.

Trust spirit,
fill holes of inadequacy,
focus attention.

Passion to brightness,
symbols unfold,
receive mystical teachings.

 

Dear Cameron,

Today is your 14th birthday and we remember all the ways you embraced life:

playing baseball with passion,

entertaining us with Michael Jackson dancing,

and adventures on the beach with friends.

You taught us all about hope, love, and faith as you courageously battled leukemia.

You were like a brother to my son, and you increased his ability to show empathy,

taught him about the loyalty of friendship,

and inspired him to play baseball in honor of your name.

Cameron Varnell, you have changed our lives forever, we remember you always, and celebrate your greatest gift:

your powerful spirit.

Love,

Your Friends and Family

 

 

Turtle
by Mary Oliver
Now I see it–
it nudges with its bulldog head
the slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble;
and now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal

who is leading her soft children
from one side of the pond to the other; she keeps
close to the edge
and they follow closely, the good children–

the tender children,
the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet
into the darkness.
And now will come–I can count on it–the murky splash,

the certain victory
of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic
circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks
flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart

will be most mournful
on their account. But, listen,
what’s important?
Nothing’s important

except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,
of which this is a part,
not to be denied. Once,
I happened to see, on a city street, in summer,

a dusty, fouled turtle plodded along–
a snapper–
broken out I suppose from some backyard cage–
and I knew what I had to do–

I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it–
I put it, like a small mountain range,
into a knapsack, and I took it out
of the city, and I let it

down into the dark pond, into
the cool water,
and the light of the lilies,
to live.

 

The Ponds
by Mary Oliver

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them –

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided –
and that one wears an orange blight –
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away –
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled –
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing –
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Sleeping in the Forest
by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.