Mary Oliver

There is a place in the woods where the vanishing bodies of our dogs, our dogs of the past, lie in the sweet-smelling earth. How they ran through these woods! Too late, world, to deny them their lives of motion, of burly happiness. After Luke died, I crossed and recrossed the Province Lands, wherever we had been, and wherever I found her paw-prints in the sand I dragged branches and leaves and slabs of bark over them, so they would last, would keep from the wind a long time. Then, overnight, after maybe three weeks, in a dazzling, rearranging rain, they were gone.

and so you bow
to the lightning of her eyes

through the feathers
of the February snow,
she flows
to her nest

You can
die for it —
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly

smiling, hating us,
dancing for his life.

The sea
isn’t a place
but a fact, and
a mystery
under its green and black
cobbled coat that never
stops moving.

Surely the sea
is the most beautiful fact
in our universe, but
you won’t find a fisherman
who will say so;
what they say is,
See you later.

All winter the water
has crashed over
the cold sand. Now
it breaks over the thin
branch of your body.

And Him, somewhere, ponderously lifting another world,
setting it free to spin, if it can,
in a darkness you can’t imagine.

My dog didn’t know
what dogs usually do.