A review by e333mily
Dream Work by Mary Oliver

5.0

You don't want to hear the story 
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen 

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story — 
a few people just trying, 
one way or another, 
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind, 
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to 
swim through the fires to stay in 
this world.

*

there is still 
somewhere deep within you 
a beast shouting that the earth 
is exactly what it wanted —

*

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

*

Those days I was willing, but frightened.
What I mean is, I wanted to live my life 
but I didn't want to do what I had to do 
to go on, which was: to go back

*

have you dared to count 
the months as they pass and the years

while you imagined pleasure, 
shining like honey, locked in some 
secret tree? have you dared to feel 
the isolation gathering

intolerably and recognized
what kinds of explosions can follow 
from an intolerable condition?

*

That time
I wanted to die 
somebody
was playing the piano 
in the room with me.

*

It never grew easy,
but at last I grew peaceful

*

determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

*

Every morning I walk like this around 
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart 
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning, so far, I'm alive.