Fox
by: Mary Oliver
You don't ever know where
a sentence will take you, depending
on its roll and fold. I was walking
over the dunes when I saw
the red fox asleep under the green
branches of the pine. It flared up
in the sweet order of its being,
the tail that was over the muzzle
lifting in airy amazement
and the fire of the eyes followed
and the pricked ears and the thin
barrel body and the four
athletic legs in their black stockings and it
came to me how the polish of the world changes
everything, I was hot I was cold I was almost
dead of delight. Of course the mind keeps
cool in its hidden palace--yes, the mind takes
a long time, is otherwise occupied than by
happiness, and deep breathing. Still,
at last, it comes too, running
like a wild thing, to be taken
with its twin sister, breath. So I stood
on the pale, peach-colored sand, watching the fox
as it opened like a flower, and I began
softly, to pick among the vast assortment of words
that it should run again and again across the page
that you again and again should shiver with praise.
If you haven't noticed by the pictures I've been using in my posts, I've been a little in love with clouds recently. The same way that Oliver is in love with the fox in today's poem, trying to capture it in a sentence or line of poetry, letting it run again and again across the page. When I seek out Mary moments every day, almost inevitably my eyes are drawn skyward, and I am brought to a standstill by some cloud formation. It may be its shape or color, or it may be the sun trapped in its ribcage.
On average, a one kilometer by one kilometer cumulus bank weighs 1.1 billion pounds. That's the same as a herd of 100 African elephants. So, those beautiful, wispy fingers scratching the sky's belly could easily flatten every house in my neighborhood and then some.
Tonight, as I was watching a concert at the library where I work, I looked up. A herd of clouds was parading across the sky. Yet, nobody else seemed to notice this celestial circus. I get it The band was great, playing rockabilly songs with screaming guitar and slapping bass. That's what all the people around me had showed up for. They weren't there to cloud watch.
Cloud watching as a pastime goes out of style for most people at a very young age. One day, you wake up and look outside. Instead of seeing cloud dragons and cloud dolphins, you see sheet iron clouds that will soon dump two feet of snow on your head. Clouds become the enemy--ruining travel plans and workdays, straining back muscles, and just fucking things up in general.
But the clouds this evening were brilliant, what Bob Ross would have described as "happy little clouds living right there in the sky." They were clouds that deserved a portrait or poem. I snapped a picture with my iPhone, but, of course, no photo can ever really capture what you see with the naked eye. No rain. No snow. Just beauty, beauty, beauty falling into my upturned face.
Even what I'm typing right now doesn't really come close to this Mary moment. Because words are just another lens to parse miracles into manageable pieces. But believe me when I say this: those clouds made me shiver with praise as I stood on the library steps tonight.
Saint Marty tried (and probably failed) to capture another Mary moment with words a few days ago . . .
Like the Moon
by: Martin Achatz
after Wendell Berry
Like the moon
on a moonless night,
love is always present
even if you can't see its face.
I know that the reason
the moon shines is not
because it has a furnace
heart running nonstop
in the basement of night.
No, it dazzles
in the dark
because of the attention
of the sun. It absorbs,
reflects the sun's cosmic
caresses, the kiss
of its nuclear lips. Who
wouldn't wax and bloom
under that spell?
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