Mary Oliver is the best-selling poet in America by a long shot. And her life, mostly in Provincetown, Massachusetts but in her last years in Florida, produced some of the most celebrated nature poetry of the age.
As a gay woman with a fair amount of trauma in her life (listen to the excellent On Being interview with her) she managed to tap into the numinous and healing in the natural world with such beauty.
Some of her work is so widely anthologised as to be almost invisible ("Wild Swans" anyone?) but this poem from her New and Selected Poems Vol. 1 is fresh and startling. There are nods to Wallace Steven's Sunday Morning and its wide waters and the almost annihilating intensity of the swan's approach makes me think of death. Or God? Or Rilke? (Who also wrote a beautiful poem about the swan). And of course, Yeat's swans at Coole too.
The Swan
Across the wide waters
something comes
floating - a slim
and delicate
ship, filled
with white flowers -
and it moves
on its miraculous muscles
as though time didn't exist,
as though bringing such gifts
to the dry shore
was a happiness
almost beyond bearing.
And now it turns its dark eyes,
it rearranges
the cloud of its wings,
it trails
an elaborate webbed foot,
the color of charcoal.
Soon it will be here.
Oh, what shall I do
when that poppy-colored beak
rests in my hand?
Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:
I miss my husband's company -
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! the path to heaven
doesn't lie down in flat miles.
It's in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,
and the gestures
with which you honour it.
Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those
white wings
touch the shore?