August 1: "One Hundred White-Sided Dolphins on a Summer Day," Long Day, In the World

Mary Oliver admires . . . 

One Hundred White-Sided Dolphins

on a Summer Day

by:  Mary Oliver

1.

Fat,

black, slick,

galloping in the pitch

of the waves in the pearly

fields of the sea,

they leap toward us,

they rise, sparkling, and vanish, and rise sparkling,

they breathe little clouds of mist, they lift perpetual smiles,

they slap their tails on the waves, grandmothers and grandfathers

enjoying the old jokes,

they circle around us,

they swim with us--

2.

a hundred white-sided dolphins

on a summer day,

each one, as God himself

could not appear more acceptable

a hundred times,

in a body blue and black threading through

the sea foam,

and lifting himself up from the opened

tents of the waves on his fishtail,

to look

with the moon of his eye

into my heart,

3.

and find there

pure, sudden, steep, sharp, painful

gratitude

that falls--

I don't know--either

unbearable tons

or the pale, bearable hand

of salvation

on my neck,

lifting me

from the boat's plain plank seat

into the world's

4.

unspeakable kindness.

It is my sixty-third summer on earth

and, for a moment, I have almost vanished

into the body of the dolphin

into the moon-eye of God,

into the white fan that lies at the bottom of the sea

with everything

that ever was, or ever will be,

supple, wild, rising on flank or fishtail--

singing or whistling or breathing damply through blowhole

at top of head.  Then, in our little boat, the dolphins suddenly gone,

we sailed on through the brisk, cheerful day.

You know, sometimes Mary says it all and better than I ever could.  This is one of those times.

After a very long day that started at 4 .m., I am at the end of my mind's capacity to form coherent thought.  Like Oliver in the poem, I was just riding in my little boat tonight, without the energy even to fall asleep.  While my wife drove us home, I was in the world but, at the same time, not in it.  Just present.

And then there was the sun, blazing gold above the trees.  When Oliver sees the one hundred white-sided dolphins in her sixty-third summer, she vanishes, becomes part of them, leaping and slapping the water.  Tonight, after over five decades of summers, I simmered in that gilded evening sun.  I didn't quite vanish, but I put my head back on the headrest and let myself detach.  Float.

Another Mary Oliver moment for Saint Marty.