Thirst by Mary Oliver

Six Recognitions of the Lord
    1.
I know a lot of fancy words.
I tear them from my heart and my tongue.
Then I pray.
    2.
Lord God, mercy is in your hands, pour
me a little. And tenderness too. My
need is great. Beauty walks so freely
and with such gentleness. Impatience puts
a halter on my face and I run away over
the green fields wanting your voice, your
tenderness, but having to do with only
the sweet grasses of the fields against
my body. When I first found you I was
filled with light, now the darkness grows
and it is filled with crooked things, bitter
and weak, each one bearing my name.
    3.
I lounge on the grass, that’s all. So
simple. Then I lie back until I am
inside the cloud that is just above me
but very high, and shaped like a fish.
Or, perhaps not. Then I enter the place
of not-thinking, not-remembering, not-
wanting. When the blue jay cries out his
riddle, in his carping voice, I return.
But I go back, the threshold is always
near. Over and back, over and back. Then
I rise. Maybe I rub my face as though I
have been asleep. But I have not been
asleep. I have been, as I say, inside
the cloud, or, perhaps, the lily floating
on the water. Then I go back to town,
to my own house, my own life, which has
now become brighter and simpler, some-
where I have never been before.
    4.
Of course I have always known you
are present in the clouds, and the
black oak I especially adore, and the
wings of birds. But you are present
too in the body, listening to the body,
teaching it to live, instead of all
that touching, with disembodied joy.
We do not do this easily. We have
lived so long in the heaven of touch,
and we maintain our mutability, our
physicality, even as we begin to
apprehend the other world. Slowly we
make our appreciative response.
Slowly appreciation swells to
astonishment. And we enter the dialogue
of our lives that is beyond all under-
standing or conclusion. It is mystery.
It is love of God. It is obedience.
    5.
Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with
the fragrance of the fields and the
freshness of the oceans which you have
made, and help me to hear and to hold
in all dearness those exacting and wonderful
words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying:
Follow me.
    6.
Every summer the lilies rise
    and open their white hands until they almost
cover the black waters of the pond. And I give
    thanks but it does not seem like adequate thanks,
it doesn’t seem
    festive enough or constant enough, nor does the
name of the Lord or the words of thanksgiving come
    into it often enough. Everywhere I go I am
treated like royalty, which I am not. I thirst and
    am given water. My eyes thirst and I am given
the white lilies on the black water. My heart
    sings but the apparatus of singing doesn’t convey
half what it feels and means. In spring there’s hope,
    in fall the exquisite, necessary diminishing, in
winter I am as sleepy as any beast in its
    leafy cave, but in summer there is
everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts,
    the hospitality of the Lord and my
inadequate answers as I row my beautiful, temporary body
    through this water-lily world.

The Beautiful, Striped Sparrow
    In the afternoons,
    in the almost empty fields,
        I hum the hymns
            I used to sing
    in church.
    They could not tame me,
        so they would not keep me,
            alas,
    and how that feels,
    the weight of it,
        I will not tell
            any of you,
    not ever.
    Still, as they promised,
        God, once he is in your heart,
            is everywhere—
    so even here
    among the weeds
        and the brisk trees.
            How long does it take
    to hum a hymn? Strolling
    one or two acres
        of the sweetness
            of the world,
    not counting
    a lapse, now and again,
        of sheer