Favorite Poems

Dogfish 

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thingkept flickering in with the tideand looking around. Black as a fisherman’s boot,with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smileunder the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,which was roughas a thousand sharpened nails.

And you knowwhat a smile means,don’t you?

*

I wanted the past to go away, I wantedto leave it, like another country; I wantedmy life to close, and openlike a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the songwhere it fallsdown over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;I wantedto hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alivefor a little while.

*

It was evening, and no longer summer.Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,huddled in the highest ripplesas it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole bodyone gesture, one black sleevethat could fit easily aroundthe bodies of three small fish.

*

Also I wantedto be able to love. And we all knowhow that one goes,don’t we?

Slowly

*

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

*

You don’t want to hear the storyof my life, and anywayI 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 toswim through the fires to stay inthis world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fishbetter wake up and dash themselves awayfrom the hopeless future that isbulging toward them.

*

And probably,if they don’t waste timelooking for an easier world,

they can do it.

–Mary Oliver