Mary Oliver
A Meeting
She steps into the dark swamp where the long wait ends. The secret slippery package drops to the weeds. She leans her long neck and tongues it between breaths slack with exhaustion and after a while it rises and becomes a creature like her, but much smaller. So now there are two. And they walk together like a dream under the trees. In early June, at the edge of a field thick with pink and yellow flowers I meet them. I can only stare. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her child leaps among the flowers, the blue of the sky falls over me like silk, the flowers burn, and I want to live my life all over again, to begin again, to be utterly wild. |
Aunt Leaf
Needing one, I invented her – – the great-great-aunt dark as hickory called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud or The-Beauty-of-the-Night. Dear aunt, I’d call into the leaves, and she’d rise up, like an old log in a pool, and whisper in a language only the two of us knew the word that meant follow, and we’d travel cheerful as birds out of the dusty town and into the trees where she would change us both into something quicker – – two foxes with black feet, two snakes green as ribbons, two shimmering fish – – and all day we’d travel. At day’s end she’d leave me back at my own door with the rest of my family, who were kind, but solid as wood and rarely wandered. While she, old twist of feathers and birch bark, would walk in circles wide as rain and then float back scattering the rags of twilight on fluttering moth wings; or she’d slouch from the barn like a gray opossum; or she’d hang in the milky moonlight burning like a medallion, this bone dream, this friend I had to have, this old woman made out of leaves. |