Morning at Great Pond
It starts like this:
forks of light
slicking up
out of the east,
flying over you,
and what’s left of night-
its black waterfalls;
its craven doubt-
dissolves like gravel
as the sun appears
trailing clouds
of pink and green wool;
igniting the fields;
turning the ponds
to plates of fire.
The creatures there
are dark flickerings
you make out
one by one
as the light lifts-
great blue herons,
wood ducks shaking
their shimmering crests-
and knee-deep
in the purple shallows
a deer drinking:
as she turns
the silver water
crushes like silk,
shaking the sky;
and you’re healed then
from the night, your heart
wants more, you're ready
to rise and look!
to hurry anywhere!
to believe in everything.
Mary Oliver, American Primitive

Not Easily

When we get beyond beauty and pleasure,
to the other side of the heart(but short
of the spirit), we are confused about what
to do next. It is too easy to say arriving
is enough. To pretend the music
of the mountain needs only to be heard.
That the dance is known by the dancing;
and the lasagna is realized by eating it.
Not in this place on the other side
of desire. We can swim in the Aegean,
but we can't take it home. A man finds
a melon by the road and continues up
the hill thinking it is the warm melon
that will remain after he has forgotten
the ruins and sea of the summer. He tells
himself this even as the idea of the taste
is replacing what the melon tasted like.

Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

W.B. Yeats