Mary Oliver

if the bees know that otherwise death

is everywhere, even in the red swamp

of a flower. But they did this

with no small amount of desperation—you might say: love

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 nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,
they can do it.

in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
and dreams do not lie.

whatever
the name of the catastrophe, it is never
the opposite of love.

How does any of us live in this world?

Home, I said.
In every language there is a word for it.
In the body itself, climbing
those walls of white thunder, past those green
temples, there is also
a word for it.
I said, home.

death is the fascinating snake
under the leaves, sliding
and sliding