3 April 2013: Maggie's Poetry Selection For Your Pleasure

SPRING

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

By Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems.

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HUBBLE THURSDAY 15 APRIL 2010

(Nucleus of Galaxy Centaurus A)

Every Thursday, I post a very large photograph of some corner of space captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and available online from the picture album at HubbleSite, followed by poetry after the jump.


SELF-PORTRAIT
by Mary Oliver
I wish I was twenty and in love with life
and still full of beans.

Onward, old legs!
There are the long, pale dunes; on the other side
the roses are blooming and finding their labor
no adversity to the spirit.

Upward, old legs! There are the roses, and there is the sea
shining like a song, like a body
I want to touch

though I'm not twenty
and won't be again but ah! seventy. And still
in love with life. And still
full of beans.

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HUBBLE THURSDAY 10 DECEMBER 2009

(Hubble Image Showcases Star Birth in M83, the Southern Pinwheel)

Every Thursday, I post a very large photograph of some corner of space captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and available online from the picture album at HubbleSite, followed by poetry after the jump.


STARLINGS IN WINTER

by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

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HUBBLE THURSDAY

(Perseids meteor, 1997; click on image to enlarge.)

Every Thursday, I post a very large photograph of some corner of space captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and available online from the picture album at HubbleSite.

Today, however, in honor of us being in the middle of the annual Perseids meteor shower, I'm posting a photo from a different source, taken and copyrighted by Rick Scott & Joe Orman. Their explanation is:

"Like falling stardust, cast off bits of comet Swift-Tuttle hurtle through the upper atmosphere about this time each year as planet Earth passes near the comet's orbital path. For the northern hemisphere, this regular celestial display is known as the annual Perseid meteor shower -- so named because the meteor trails all appear traceable to a common 'radiant point' in the constellation Perseus. This gorgeous wide-angle photo from the 1997 shower captures a 20-degree-long fireball meteor and another, fainter Perseid meteor trail in a rich area of the northern summer Milky Way. A labeled version is available identifying the shower's radiant point, surrounding deep-sky objects, and constellations."

WALKING TO OAK-HEAD POND, AND THINKING OF THE PONDS I WILL VISIT IN THE NEXT DAYS AND WEEKS

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled-
I'm wading along

in the sunlight-
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead-
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon-
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don't know where
such certainty comes from-
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind-

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage-
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.


~~ by Mary Oliver, from What Do We Know

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HUBBLE THURSDAY

(Ultraviolet Image of Multiple Comet Impacts on Jupiter from Hubble Telescope)

In lieu of my usual Hubble Telescope image from HubbleSite, today I'm highlighting this week's discovery of an asteroid impact on Jupiter which left a scar the size of the Earth (!). It was spotted by Anthony Wesley of Canberra, Australia, an amateur astronomer using a home-made telescope. This Times Online article is fascinating reporting on the event -- do read all the way through to the end. This Scientific American article is also good reading. Below is the Reuters image of the scar -- there isn't a photo of this event yet available from Hubble.

(July 2009 -- impact scar on Jupiter from asteroid collision)

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.


by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive

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YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE GOOD

(Wild Geese Flying Across a Crescent Moon, woodcut by Hiroshige, circa 1835)

Here's another item pinned to the wall beside my bed -- a poem by Mary Oliver which has helped me more times than I can count.

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.


From Dream Work © Mary Oliver, published by Atlantic Monthly Press

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