The Photograph by Mary Oliver

I still can see, though ten white winters lean

Between me and the flowers in your hand,

Our happiness that vanished summer day,

Our captured hope and valor as we stand

Under some trees and wave across the summer.

Infected by its margins, soon or late

All wild things fade away. See how the trees

Crumble toward nothing like the last thin scrawls

In letters of goodbye; see how the lawn

Descends nowhere; and how the luck is over

There at the stricken center where we wait

With half our smiles, and all our magic gone.

And the white terror moves on, lapping inward,

Like mist, like silence, that will take it all.

Ten years away and wondering what to do,

I search my spirit for some flush of pain.

But thought by thought the quiet moments fall.

My heart, my heart is blank as hills of snow! —

And all time leads us toward that last december .. .

I stare upon your crumbling smile and keep you.

I do not love you now, but I remember.

In a Far Summer

What can be returned? Time will not curve.

The moon, the clocks, they know the act is final.

Out of all grief or rejoicing, in the mind’s eye,

I see us there, and there, and yet again




Forever poised in the motions of a lost truth.

We have lived, we have built our own perimeters

In time, and now, in the stone grave of dreams,

Climb hopelessly the past’s unscalable walls.




I cannot give you back the thing you ask;

Nor can you, I think, who hunt oblivion now,

Persuade it to your wish. O love, we were never,

Not even for a moment, safe in that room




From the studying thieves of grief. Yet all that happened —

It wrinkled mirrors and sank beneath their surface,

Blossomed in darkness, till very darkness now

Is notebook to the dream. No, no, my dear,




You cannot fuse the finding and the failing.

— Useless to cry now how the world has altered;

— Useless to climb against those marble walls;

For time will not free us from the most fallen truth.




And though the mirrors drink now your sad, wrecked verbs,

Somewhere in the cities of the blood,

In a small room, in a far summer, we lie

And share the gift, before the disaster, of love.