Upstream by Mary Oliver Read Free Book Online

second, hold them against my face. The fringes of paradise: summer on earth. They, too, will nourish me. Last week I ate the eggs of the turtle, like little golden suns; today, the honey locust blossoms, in batter, will make the finest crepes of the most common pancakes. My body, which must be fed, will be well fed. The hawk, in the pale pink evening, went back to the body of the pheasant. The turtle lay a long time on the bottom of the pond, resting. Then sheturned, her eyes upon some flickering nearby as, without terror, without sorrow, but in the voracious arms of the first of the earth’s gods, she did what she must, she did what all must do. All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond wateritself.

SECTION THREE
    Wherever I’ve lived my room and soon the entire house is filled with books; poems, stories, histories, prayers of all kinds stand up gracefully or are heaped on shelves, on the floor, on the bed. Strangers old and new offering their words bountifully and thoughtfully, lifting my heart.
    But, wait! I’ve made a mistake! how could these makers of so many books that have given so much to my life—how could they possibly be strangers?
    M.O.

Emerson: An Introduction
    The distinction and particular value of anything, or any person, inevitably must alter according to the time and place from which we take our view. In any new discussion of Emerson, these two weights are upon us. By time, of course, I mean our entrance into the twenty-first century; it has been two hundred years since Emerson’s birth in Boston. By place, I mean his delivery from the town of Concord, and all his corporeal existence anywhere. Now he is only within the wider, immeasurable world of our thoughts. He lives nowhere but on the page, and in the attentive mind that leans above that page.
    This has some advantage for us, for he is now the Emerson of our choice: he is the man of his own time—his own history—or he is one of the mentors of ours. Each of these possibilities has its attractions, for the man alive was unbelievably sweet and, for all his devotion toreason, wondrously spontaneous. Yet as time’s passage has broken him free of all mortal events, we begin to know him more clearly for the labors of his life: the life of his mind. Surely he was looking for something that would abide beyond the Tuesday or the Saturday, beyond even his first powerful or cautionary or lovely effect. “The office of the scholar,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.” The lofty fun of it is that his “appearances” were all merely material and temporal—brick walls, garden walls, ripening pears—while his facts were all of a shifty vapor and an unauthored goodwill—the luminosity of the pears, the musics of birds and the wind, the affirmative staring-out light of the night stars. And his belief that a man’s inclination, once awakened to it, would be to turn all the heavy sails of his life to a moral purpose.
    _______
    The story of his life, as we can best perceive it from its appearances, is as follows. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803; his father, William Emerson, died in 1811. The family—his mother, two sisters, and five brothers—were poor, devout, and intellectually ambitious. Death’s fast or slow lightning was a too-frequent presence. Both girls and one boy died in childhood; Emerson’s brothersWilliam, Edward, and Charles survived only into early manhood. The only remaining brother to live a life of full length was Robert, who was a man of childish mind. Even as the poet Walt Whitman for most of his life took responsibility for his child-minded brother, Eddie, so did Emerson keep watch over this truculent survivor.
    Emerson graduated from Harvard