pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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HOW SHALL I TOUCH YOU UNLESS IT IS EVERYWHERE?

Here is the beautiful concluding poem in American Primitive (1983).

THE GARDENS
(Mary Oliver)

You gleam
as you lie back
breathing like something
taken from water,
a sea creature, except
for your two human legs
which tremble
and open
into the dark country
I keep dreaming of. How
shall I touch you
unless it is
everywhere?
I begin here and there,
finding you,
the heart within you,
and the animal,
and the voice; I ask
over and over
for your whereabouts, trekking
wherever you take me,
the boughs of your body
leading deeper into the trees,
over the white fields,
the rivers of bone,
the shouting,
the answering, the rousing,
great run toward the interior,
the unseen, the unknowable
center.

•

"How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?"

It really is a blasphemy to write prose after those lines because now anyone reading this won't have the pleasure of having that poem linger undisturbed. Great big apologies but, nevertheless, here I go a'typing away.

I have been bent over my table working at the computer all day, but just stopped to cook a ribeye and some spinach. Edited 192 pages since I came home from my scriptwriting meeting last night and my brain is crispy fried and throbbing. It is also spilling over with ideas and ponderings, which is very satisfying.

It's 6:57 PM on a holiday Friday—Good Friday (or at least it will be if Duke, UNC, and NCSU prevail in the tournament. If they don't, then Bird's world, like an Episcopal sanctuary and her chances of winning the office NCAA bracket pool, will go dark).

Now I am quitting work while my back still bends.

6:44 p.m. - 2005-03-25

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