A Bitterness

I believe you did not have a happy life.
I believe you were cheated.
I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.
I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.
I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.
I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.
I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.
I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness.
I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and unassuaged.
Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillside.

-Mary Oliver
from New and Selected Poems, Vol 1

A friend turned me on to Mary Oliver recently, and in fact back on to poetry in general. Much of what she writes is pretty but doesn’t really touch me just now, but then something like this floats across the page and I am struck down for a while, trying to take it in.

Today

Today’s Strolling Music: The Worst of Jefferson Airplane

Today
Today
I feel like pleasing you
More than before.
Today
I know what I want to do
But I don’t know what for.
To be living for you
Is all I want to do.
To be loving you
It’ll all be there when my dreams come true.

Today
You’ll make me say that I
Somehow have changed.
Today
You look in my eyes
I’m just not the same.
To be any more than all I am
Would be a lie.
I’m so full of love
I could burst apart
And start to cry.

Today
Everything you want I swear
It all will come true.
Today
I realize how much
I’m in love with you.

With you standing here
I could tell the world
What it means to love.
To go on from here
I can’t use words
They don’t say enough.

Please, please
Listen to me
Its taking so long to come true.
Its all for you.
All for you.