Member-only story
Soul of The Artist
Somewhere a black bear
has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring
I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass, the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness coming
down the mountain, breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her — her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.
~ Mary Oliver
*
How have I been able to live all this time without knowing that everything in the world has a voice and can speak? Not only the things to which one language allows, no, the others as well: the gateways, the walls of the houses, the beams, the shadows of the trees, the sand and the silence.
