"The Sea" by Mary Oliver
The Sea
Stroke by
stroke my
body remembers that life and cries for
the lost parts of itself----
fins, gills
opening like flowers into
the flesh----my legs
want to lock and become
one muscle, I swear I know
just what the blue-gray scales
shingling
the rest of me would
feel like!
paradise! Sprawled
in that motherlap,
in that dreamhouse
of salt and exercise,
what a spillage
of nostalgia pleads
from the very bones! how
they long to give up the long trek
inland, the brittle
beauty of understanding,
and dive,
and simply
become again a flaming body
of blind feeling
sleeking along
in the luminous roughage of the sea's body,
vanished
like victory inside that
insucking genesis, that
roaring flamboyance, that
perfect
beginning and
conclusion of our own.
Poem from MARY OLIVER: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS Volume One (Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize) pp.172-173 Beacon Press, Boston www.beaconpress.org
This poem originally appeared in AMERICAN PRIMITIVE by Mary Oliver (published by Little, Brown and Company)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please share your thoughts about what you read on this Path. Thanks!