Home ⇒ 📌Mary Oliver ⇒ Dogfish
Dogfish
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
Kept flickering in with the tide
And looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
With a white belly.
If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
Under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
Which was rough
As a thousand sharpened nails.
And you know
What a smile means,
Don’t you?
*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
To leave it, like another country; I wanted
My life to close, and open
Like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
Where it falls
Down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
To hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
Whoever I was, I was
Alive
For a little while.
*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
Huddled in the highest ripples
As it came
One gesture, one black sleeve
That could fit easily around
The bodies of three small fish.
*
Also I wanted
To be able to love. And we all know
How that one goes,
Don’t we?
Slowly
*
The dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
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.
*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
Better wake up and dash themselves away
From the hopeless future that is
Bulging toward them.
*
And probably,
If they don’t waste time
Looking for an easier world,
They can do it.
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