Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
from The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver
“In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change there’s never been a day that my friends haven’t been able to say, and at a distance, ‘There’s Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook,”’ Oliver wrote in Long Life, a book of essays published in 2004.
“But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/17/mary-oliver-death-poet
Mary Oliver, a prolific poet whose work garnered a wide audience for its clear, direct explorations of the natural world, died Thursday at her home Hobe Sound, Florida, according to Bill Reichblum, her literary executor. She was 83.
In more than 15 collections of poetry and other works of prose, Oliver’s writing, rooted in the Romantic nature writing tradition and the landscapes she loved, reflected her deep and loving attention to the world around her.
https://lithub.com/poet-mary-oliver-dies-at-83/
"When for too long I don't go deep enough
into the woods to see them, they begin to
enter my dreams. Yes, there they are, in the
pinewoods of my inner life. I want to live a life
full of modesty and praise. Each hoof of each
animal makes the sign of a heart as it touches
then lifts away from the ground. Unless you
believe that heaven is very near, how will you
find it? Their eyes are pools in which one
would be content, on any summer afternoon,
to swim away through the door of the world.
Then, love and its blessing. Then: heaven."
The Faces of Deer
by Mary Oliver
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