White Flowers by Mary Oliver

12. February 2010, 23:33 Uhrmary oliverrinabeana

My cousin and her husband came over for dinner and we watched the Opening Ceremonies. It’s over 2 hours past my bedtime and I didn’t have anything on tap to post. Thankfully there was an e-mail from my poetry buddy waiting for me!



White Flowers
By Mary Oliver

Last night
in the fields
I lay down in the darkness
to think about death,
but instead I fell asleep,
as if in a vast and sloping room
filled with those white flowers
that open all summer,
sticky and untidy,
in the warm fields.
When I woke
the morning light was just slipping
in front of the stars,
and I was covered
with blossoms.
I don’t know
how it happened—
I don’t know
if my body went diving down
under the sugary vines
in some sleep-sharpened affinity
with the depths, or whether
that green energy
rose like a wave
and curled over me, claiming me
in its husky arms.
I pushed them away, but I didn’t rise.
Never in my life had I felt so plush,
or so slippery,
or so resplendently empty.
Never in my life
had I felt myself so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and the stems and the flowers
began.

2 comments:

  1. Doug, 13. February 2010, 20:24

    Ah yes, watching the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Up her in Canada, it’s becoming one of the few times our otherwise quiet country puffs itself up and raises its collective bilingual voice in outlandish patriotism. I do have to wonder how much sense the rest of the world makes of all the insider references and obscure multicultural images built into the ceremony.

    Though all in all, it was a good show with some genuinely moving touches.

    And what has this all got to do with poetry?

    There was even a poetry moment in the ceremony! k.d. lang sang Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluja.” I’ll always think of Cohen as a writer and poet first.

    So there it is… there is no escaping poety.

     
  2. emerson, 15. February 2010, 15:09

    It was pretty bad. I mean some of the opening ceremony wwas good, K.D. Lang was good, but the torch thing broke and there were those scottish tap-dancing pirates? And Peter Pan from Prairie Land…I don’t think it represented Vancouver. And then those people rioting the day after…that was scary, I’m glad I didn’t go downtown that day.

     

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