Humpbacks
by
Mary Oliver
There
is, all around us,
this country
of original
fire.
You know what
I mean.
The sky, after
all, stops at nothing, so something
has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich
and timeless stables or else
we would fly
away.
Off
Stellwagen
off the Cape,
the humpbacks
rise. Carrying their tonnage
of barnacles and
joy
they leap
through the water, they nuzzle back under it
like children
at play.
They sing, too.
And not for
any reason
you can’t
imagine.
Three
of them
rise to the
surface near the bow of the boat,
then dive
deeply, their
huge scarred flukes
tipped to
the air.
We wait, not
knowing
just where
it will happen; suddenly
they smash
through the surface, someone begins
shouting for
joy and you realize
it is yourself
as they surge
upward and
you see for the first time
how huge they
are, as they breach,
and dive,
and breach again
through the
shining blue flowers
of the split
water and you see them
for some unbelievable
part of a
moment against the sky–
like nothing
you’ve ever imagined–
like the myth
of the fifth morning galloping
out of darkness,
pouring
heavenward,
spinning; then
they
crash back under those black silks
and we all
fall back
together into
that wet fire, you
know what
I mean.
I
know a captain who has seen them
playing with
seaweed, swimming
through the
green islands, tossing
the slippery
branches into the air.
I know a whale
that will come to the boat whenever
she can, and
nudge it gently along the bow
with her long
flipper.
I know several
lives worth living.
Listen,
whatever it is you try
to do with
your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams
of your body,
its spirit
longing to
fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their
dark mane and hurry
back into
the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great
whale,
throbs with
song.
From
AMERICAN PRIMITIVE by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1978, 1979, 1980,
1981, 1982, 1983 by Mary Oliver; first appeared in COUNTRY JOURNAL,
May 1982. By permission of Little, Brown and Company, Inc. All rights
reserved. For information about the book, please call 1-800-759-0190.
Mary
Oliver was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for AMERICAN
PRIMITIVE. Her poems, "Humpbacks" and "Gannets"
are included in her book NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, for which she received
the 1992 National Book Award for Poetry.
