my birthday present

my birthday present
My awesome birthday present 1/26/11 (see story under my first post)

Saturday, May 28, 2011

The Soul

Bone
Mary Oliver

1.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape
and so, last week,
when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died
hundreds of years ago, I thought
maybe I was close
to discovering something
for the ear bone

2.

is the portion that lasts longest
in any of us, man or whale; shaped
like a squat spoon
with a pink scoop where
once, in the lively swimmer's head,
it joined its two sisters
in the house of hearing,
it was only
two inches long
and thought: the soul
might be like this
so hard, so necessary

3.

yet almost nothing.
Beside me
the gray sea
was opening and shutting its wave-doors,
unfolding over and over
its time-ridiculing roar;
I looked but I couldn't see anything
through its dark-knit glare;
yet don't we all know, the golden sand
is there at the bottom,
though our eyes have never seen it,
nor can our hands ever catch it

4.

lest we would sift it down
into fractions, and facts
certainties
and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.

from Why I Wake Early (2004)



On the Existence of Soul

Pattiann Rogers

How confident I am it is there. Don’t I bring it,   
As if it were enclosed in a fine leather case,   
To particular places solely for its own sake?   
Haven’t I set it down before the variegated canyon   
And the undeviating bald salt dome?   
Don’t I feed it on ivory calcium and ruffled   
Shell bellies, shore boulders, on the sight   
Of the petrel motionless over the sea, its splayed   
Feet hanging? Don’t I make sure it apprehends   
The invisibly fine spray more than once?

I have seen that it takes in every detail
I can manage concerning the garden wall and its borders.
I have listed for it the comings and goings
Of one hundred species of insects explicitly described.
I have named the chartreuse stripe
And the fimbriated antenna, the bulbed thorax   
And the multiple eye. I have sketched
The brilliant wings of the trumpet vine and invented
New vocabularies describing the interchanges between rocks   
And their crevices, between the holly lip   
And its concept of itself.

And if not for its sake, why would I go
Out into the night alone and stare deliberately   
Straight up into 15 billion years ago and more?

I have cherished it. I have named it.   
By my own solicitations   
I have proof of its presence.
Pattiann Rogers, “On the Existence of the Soul”
from Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems.

1 comment:

Loretta said...

Pattiann Rogers is a new poet for me, so I went on line and read some of her other poems. I like the way she expresses the sensual as well as the thinking world. It was time well spent.

Loretta