The Swan

By Mary Oliver

Across the wide waters
   something comes
      floating - a slim
         and delicate

ship, filled
   with white flowers -
      and it moves
         on its miraculous muscles

as though time didn't exist,
   as though bringing such gifts
      to the dry shore
         was a happiness

almost beyond bearing.
   and now it turns its dark eyes,
      it rearranges
         the cloud of its wings,

it trails
   an elaborate webbed foot,
      the color of charcoal.
         Soon it will be here.

Oh, what shall I do
   when that poppy-colored beak
      rests in my hand?
         Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:

I miss my husband's company -
   he is so often
      in paradise.
         Of course! the path to heaven

doesn't lie down in flat miles.
   It's in the imagination
      with which you perceive
         this world,

and the gestures
   with which you honor it.
      Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those white wings
         touch the shore?

from The Long Quiet Highway

By Natalie Goldberg

"I carried my life in Farmingdale within me wherever I went. Personal power could not come from college or an English lit book. It had to come from deep within me. I had to go back and reclaim, transform, what I had inherited at home. Eventually, I had to stop running from what I had been given. If I opened to it, loneliness cold become singleness; lethargy and boredom would transform into open space. Those fearful, negative feelings could become my teacher...If I wanted to survive- no, not just to survive, I wanted glory, I wanted to learn how to grow a rose out of a cement parking lot - I had to digest the blandness and desolation of my childhood and make them mine. I couldn't run away, even though I tried, because in fact, my roots were all I had. If I didn't transform that energy, no matter where I went - Washington, D.C., Ann Arbor, Chicago, California, New Mexico - I would still carry it with me. I would walk around like a numb ghost - and for many years I did walk around numb. Writing became my vehicle for transformation, a way to travel out of that nowhere land. And because writing is no fool, it brought me right back in. There was no place else to go, but moving my hand across the page gave me a way to eat my landscape, rather than be eaten by it."

Readings of July 24, 2005