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Mary Oliver

On the Escape of a Dream (from No Voyage 1963)

Trees pull up their polished roots and run;

Rivers, if they please, pause in their flight.

Birds hover and sing in syllables;

Lovers and friends, in curious masks, glide over the lawn.

The moon and stars wander the sky with the sun.

And I am persuaded how all these familiars, that seem

In some awful pressure to speak and fear of telling,

Have turned earth into the heart’s empirical city,

And hide in gallop and gilt the thread of logic

Offered in the rapid illogical lectures of dream .. .

I remember traveling in a gingham land:

I see the dragon in the dragonfly;

I open up the wind-wry fruit and find

The paper heart of apples. Only the blood

Reads it like sediment, can understand.

I remember spectrums flooding my blinkered gaze.

I dance with creatures wrapped in dominoes,

I marvel the high trees in which, unheeded,

In anagrams or arabic, the birds

Sing on, sing on the chapters of my days.

And when the birds splash in their leaves and shout

Farewells, and my friends fail in their crumbling masks,

And the dragon dons his lace, then what pure news,

What grammar of myself among my selves

Falls, like a candle? As the moon burns out

And the birds of day take over the hills of night,

Dawn wrinkles back; in very sleep I stir,

Feeling, like sand, the failure climb my blood;

Till the five wild gods open their diamond eyes,

And I wake, and fall through Lethe into light.



A Game of Children

In the first darkness

I watch the two boys and their sister

Running under the warm stars,

With coiled muscles and the ardent

Certainty that their fingertips can graze

The sharp hoof of a light

An instant in the acme of a leap

Before their leaping feet come back to earth.

And watching later

The night grass rise from the marks of their small shoes,

I remember, from my own time, this leaping game;

And I remember sitting in the dark

As now they sit,

By windows, before sleep,

Incredulous with themselves for failing

To accomplish impossible deeds.

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