Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches
by: Mary Oliver
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives--
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early summer,
feel like?
Do you think this world is only an entertainment for you?
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?
Well, there is time left--
fields everywhere invite you into them.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!
To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!
To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tiplets of the honeysuckle, that have opened
in the night.
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
☼☼☼☼
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
While the soul, after all, is only a window,
and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.
☼☼☼☼
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe
I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.
☼☼☼☼
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!
☼☼☼☼
A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.
☼☼☼☼
Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?
And I would touch the faces of the daisies,
and I would bow down
to think about it.
That was then, which hasn't ended yet.
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.
I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.
Amazingly, I didn't have to work today.
Yet, I still found myself distracted with anxiety and worry. Perhaps, I'm that person Oliver addresses when she says, "No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint / that something is missing from your life!" Put on your jacket, she instructs, and go out into the world. Become a part of it. Sit among the thorns and listen to the roses sing. Become a weed sitting among the weeds. Touch the faces of the daisies. Put your foot in the door of death and be amazed.
This struggle is nothing new to me. As I said last night, I've been feeling acutely overwhelmed by life in the last few days. That's one of the reasons I took today off from the library. To let go. Relax a little.
Yet, the whelm followed me, and here I sit now, treading water and looking for a lighthouse to guide me back to safe harbor.
Now, Oliver's advice for these kinds of feelings is to go outside and become part of the world. Last night, I led a poetry workshop based on the poems of Wendell Berry. One of Berry's most famous poems, "The Peace of Wild Things," pretty much offers the same advice: "I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds."
I tried today. I really did. I didn't find the wood drake or great heron. Or the peace of wild things.
Saint Marty did, however, write a poem about peace. Maybe that was the lighthouse he was looking for today . . .
The War in My Head
by: Martin Achatz
When I find myself at my desk
weeping for the war in my head,
I reach for my pen, my notebook,
squeeze all my wild thoughts out,
fill pages and pages until
I find armistice. Today, it was
a piece of chocolate
melting on my tongue,
quieting all the bombs
of the world.
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