Saturday, December 13, 2014











                    The spirit
                        likes to dress up like this:
                        ten fingers,
                        ten toes,

                        shoulders, and all the rest
                        at night
                        in the black branches,
                        in the morning

                        in the blue branches
                        of the world.
                        It could float, of course,
                        but would rather

                        plumb rough matter.
                        Airy and shapeless thing,
                        it needs
                        the metaphor of the body,

                        lime and appetite,
                        the oceanic fluids;
                        it needs the body's world,
                        instinct

                        and imagination
                        and the dark hug of time,
                        sweetness
                        and tangibility,

                        to be understood,
                        to be more than pure light
                        that burns
                        where no one is --

                        so it enters us --
                        in the morning
                        shines from brute comfort
                        like a stitch of lightning;

                        and at night
                        lights up the deep and wondrous
                        drownings of the body
                         like a star.


------Mary Oliver


 

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