Poem by Mary Oliver
Poem
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
plump 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 lightening;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body,
like a star.
Mary Oliver
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