Argyle Willow Tree, today

 
  “I know a lot of fancy words,
   I tear them from my heart and my tongue
   Then I pray.

   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.

   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,
   somewhere I have never been before.”

    From Mary Oliver’s “Six Recognitions of the Lord”