sharingpoetry:

Mary Oliver, “October”

1

There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.

What does the world
mean to you if you can’t trust it
to go on shining when you’re

not there? and there’s
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.

2

I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the
green pine tree:

little dazzler
little song,
little mouthful.

3

The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It
grunts into view. There is no measure
for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes—
there is no telling
the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns
and yawns.
Near the fallen tree
something—a leaf snapped loose
from the branch and fluttering down—tries to pull me
into its trap of attention.

4

It pulls me
into its trap of attention.

And when I turn again, the bear is gone.

5

Look, hasn’t my body already felt
like the body of a flower?

6

Look, I want to love this world
as thought it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

7

Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.

One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me—and I thought:

so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.

(via rabbit-light)

(Source: proustitute)

mythologyofblue:

October, An Elegy

The whole month of October
is an elegy, a used book store
getting rained on.  This weather
makes me read endings first.  Partings
and farewells, the way we’re baffled, startled
when happiness falls.  Let me tell you something about darkness, though,
because there’s been enough about light.  But first
about the handwritten poem copied out in the back
of a Rilke translation.  It begins with beloved,
I’m tempted to tell you, or with rest,
and is written in the kind of couplets that are made
for each other, lines with stories of how they first met,
and I’m tempted to say that after I read it, light didn’t matter,
nor darkness, that poetry somehow gathers
them both into one word.  O, how often we are baffled,
startled by our own happiness.  I read the poem
and kept its last three unresolved lines:  our
line break hearts.  There is a pause always around the word
heart, the history
of leaving, the small right-angled scars of loss.  Another line break
then into, a space, then the words:  like small trees.  We are made up
of small trees, limbs that reach for each other, forest
of longing, root systems of light, small blossoms of darkness
and there is a poem handwritten after pages of Rilke and, after Rilke,
how can our hearts be anything but small trees.  The book was used.  The lines
unresolved.  It was raining so I sat in the store and read
the ending first.  Here happiness falls, sometimes
the only difference between our
and hearts is a line break after a long elegy.  This is the season that begins
by ending.  The space between light
and darkness is unresolved
as the space between our hearts
and small trees.  Beloved, rest.  It’s true.  I read the ending first
but I kept reading it until I got all the way back
to the beginning.

-Sue Goyette, “October, An Elegy” from Undone