Spring has always been my favorite season. I love all seasons, but spring to me is nature’s triumph over all things dismal, damp and dreary. And not just because it’s been a difficult and long winter. Nature, like human life, is both painful and also amazingly beautiful. Weeks before spring actually emerges (or bursts), my dreams of it coming are the pulse of life that trumps all reality.

Perhaps it is our dreams or our imagination or our fantasies that give us that sliver of light to get through gray days. Or to outlast catastrophic weather. Or to keep from drowning in despair over human failings and loss. The real trick, I think, is really getting to what beauty is, what happiness is, even if it is fleeting. Or maybe because it is fleeting, and to seize it for all it’s worth.

That’s when poetry becomes essential.

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,
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.

~ From Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986

The Swan

Do you too see it, drifting all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air—
An armful of blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
Into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music—like the rain pelting the trees—like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

~From The Swan

No poet ever
wrote a poem to dishonor life, to compromise
high ideals, to scorn religious views, to demean hope or
gratitude, to argue against tenderness, to place rancor before
love, or to praise littleness of soul. Not one. Not ever.
On the contrary, poets have, in freedom and in prison, in health and
in misery, with listeners and without listeners, spent their
lives examining and glorifying life, meditation, thoughtfulness,
devoutness, and human love. They have done this wildly,
serenely, rhetorically, lyrically, without hope of answer or reward.
They have done this grudgingly, willingly, patiently, and in the
steams of impatience. They have done it for all and any
gods of life, and the record of their so doing
belongs to each one of us. Including you.

~ From Rules for the Dance, Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin, 1998

Mary Oliver - Printed by Mariner Books, Houghton ----Mifflin To celebrate the publication of Rules for the Dance. 1998