Yes, I’ve gone and done it again.  Another found poem.  This time instead of contrasting two poets together, I have taken one poet: Mary Oliver and pulled pieces from 8 different poems to bring together a brand new poem.  I’ve taken no more than two to four lines from each poem.  Each verse is from a different poem and in a few cases a pronoun has been changed.  After this found poem, I cite the poems that were used to create it.

Every morning I walk softly and with forward glances
down to the ponds and through the pinewoods.

I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.

I have thought sometimes that
something – I can’t name it -
watches as I walk

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”

Later, lying half-asleep under
the blankets, I watch
while the doe, glittering with rain, steps
under the wet slabs of the pines

These are the woods I love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again – a miracle

Someday I’ll live in the sky.
Meanwhile the house of my life is this green world.

In the book of the earth it is written:
nothing can die.

~Mary Oliver~

One
The Place I Want to Get Back To
Beans
When I Am Among the Trees
Clapp’s Pond
Skunk Cabbage
Boundaries
Ghosts

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles, nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain — not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

~Mary Oliver~
excerpted from American Primitive

Those who are familiar with Mary Oliver’s poetry know that she has a deep and abiding love of nature.  It’s one that I share, hence I am often drawn to her poetry.  At the conclusion of the poem, the statement: “feels like one”, I believe she is saying it feels like an answering.  Said another way, amidst the quiet majestic beauty and stillness of nature there are no unanswered questions.  Immersed in the wonder around you suddenly there are no questions left.  It is a union with nature that is so brimming with the wholeness that you and everything else is.  What’s left but to happily lose yourself inside that world, devoid of questions now, awash in a knowing and an ineluctable sense of how incredible it is to bear witness to this amazing world and yourself in it.

If there is such a thing as poetic license, I am certainly taking it now.  I have created what is known as a ‘found’ poem.  Up until now, this poem has not existed.  I have selected a couple of lines each from eight different poems and two different authors.  I chose Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry for this creation.  At the end of this found poem, I have cited the poems I used.

If you like to play with poetry, you can do this, too.  I found it a wonderful exercise as something to just drop the day’s events and lose myself inside the soft belly of poetry.  Enjoy…

* * *

I would like to write a poem about the world
that has in it, nothing fancy

Like our travels, our workdays
burned upon the world.

And forgetting everything I will leap to name it
as though for the first time

Turning always in my mind toward you,
your slopes, folds, gentle openings.

As a poem or a prayer, can also make
luminous any dark place on earth.

Maybe we’re necessary to each other,
and this vacant place has need of us both.

Calling us back to why, how and whence
such beauty and what the meaning.

To its joy we come together–the seer
and the seen, the eater and the eaten,
the lover and the loved.

* * *

Each verse was extracted from individual poems.  The pattern begins with Mary Oliver, then Wendell Berry and continues to alternate authors and poems throughout, ending with Wendell Berry.  The following references the poems used in the order that they appear:
Mary Oliver, This World
Wendell Berry, Horses
Mary Oliver, Tasting the Wild Grapes
Wendell Berry, Letter
Mary Oliver, May
Wendell Berry, A Music
Mary Oliver, First Snow
Wendell Berry, The Hidden Singer

I want to be
in partnership
with the universe

like the tiger lily
poking up
its gorgeous head

among the so-called
useless weeds
in the uncultivated fields

that still abide.
But it’s okay
if, after all,

I’m not a lily,
but only grass
in a clutch of curly grass

waving in the wind,
staring sunward: one of those
sweet, abrasive blades.

~Evidence~
Poems by Mary Oliver

In April
the ponds
open
like black blossoms,
the moon
swims in every one;
there’s fire
everywhere: frogs shouting
their desire,
their satisfaction. What
we know: that time
chops at us all like an iron
hoe, that death
is a state of paralysis. What
we long for: joy
before death, nights
in the swale — everything else
can wait but not
this thrust
from the root
of the body. What
we know: we are more
than blood — we are more
than our hunger and yet
we belong
to the moon and when the ponds
open, when the burning
begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
of hurrying down
into the black petals,
into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered,
into the body of another.

~Mary Oliver~
American Primitive

Love, love, love says Percy.
And run as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.
Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.

~Mary Oliver~
Red Bird: Poems by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~ Mary Oliver ~

This book was expected out April 4th or 5th, so for those
of us who can’t get enough of Mary Oliver, it was a real
treat that publication happened a week earlier.

Enjoy…

Summer Story

When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into the funnels