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Автор Mary Oliver
OTHER BOOKS BY MARY OLIVER
No Voyage and Other Poems
The River Styx, Ohio and Other Poems
Twelve Moons
American Primitive
Dream Work
House of Light
New and Selected Poems
White Pine
West Wind
The Leaf and the Cloud
What Do We Know
CHAPBOOKS AND SPECIAL EDITIONS
The Night Traveler
Sleeping in the Forest
Provincetown
PROSE
A Poetry Handbook
Blue Pastures
Rules for the Dance
Winter Hours
For Molly Malone Cook
CONTENTS
Wild Geese
The Dipper
Spring
Goldfinches
Such Singing in the Wild Branches
The Swan
Owls
June
Hawk
The Kingfisher
Herons in Winter in the Frozen Marsh
Hummingbirds
The Kookaburras
The Loon on Oak-Head Pond
While I Am Writing a Poem to Celebrate Summer, the Meadowlark Begins to Sing
Catbird
Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard
Bird
Wrens
Some Herons
September
Crow
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
Starlings in Winter
I Looked Up
Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond
AFTERWORD
Backyard
Beloved of children, bards and Spring,
O birds, your perfect virtues bring,
Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight,
Your manners for the heart’s delight….
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “May-Day”
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
The Dipper
Once I saw
in a quick-falling, white-veined stream,
among the leafed islands of the wet rocks,
a small bird, and knew it
from the pages of a book; it was
the dipper, and dipping he was,
as well as, sometimes, on a rock-peak, starting up
the clear, strong pipe of his voice; at this,
there being no words to transcribe, I had to
bend forward, as it were,
into his frame of mind, catching
everything I could in the tone,
cadence, sweetness, and briskness
of his affirmative report.
Though not by words, it was
a more than satisfactory way to the
bridge of understanding. This happened
in Colorado
more than half a century ago—
more, certainly, than half my lifetime ago—
and, just as certainly, he has been sleeping for decades
in the leaves beside the stream,
his crumble of white bones, his curl of flesh
comfortable even so.
And still I hear him—
and whenever I open the ponderous book of riddles
he sits with his black feet hooked to the page,
his eyes cheerful, still burning with water-love—
and thus the world is full of leaves and feathers,
and comfort, and instruction. I do not even remember
your name, great river,
but since that hour I have lived
simply,
in the joy of the body as full and clear
as falling water; the pleasures of the mind
like a dark bird dipping in and out, tasting and singing.
