Monday morning I was feeling down in the dumps. I was sitting on the floor by the side of my bed doing a bit of yoga and trying to breathe myself out of my head and into a more expansive space. On my nightstand was the latest edition of the Best American Poetry (2006), so I picked it up and opened it to see what might fall out and found this poem by Mary Oliver. I was reminded how her poems were the portal through which I reconnected with poetry and understood the power of poems to reach into the soul and lay it open. I think what I love most about her writing is that she is so grounded in the earth and all of the plants and animals and minerals that inhabit it and she has the vision to see how we, the humans, are eternally trying to reconcile the earthly ways with the transcience of our own existence. We are made of the same fragile flesh but we have this capacity to comprehend that there is something beyond, that there is some organizing force pulsing through it all. Her poetry continues to touch me deeply.

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need any more of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

from New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
Beacon Press, 2005