THE PACIFIC

I have a lot more to say about my vacation, but I found this today and I want you to know that having now swam in the Pacific, having been on the edge of land and compared the straight line of the sea to the Arizona badlands, and that the false sense of having somehow been a hero, or that my presence deserves someting other than just another day, that a poem like this has a whole new side to it for me.

The Sun

Have you ever seen

anything

in your life

more wonderful than the way the sun,

every evening,

relaxed and easy,

floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills,

or the rumpled sea,

and is gone—

and how it slides again out of the blackness,

every morning,

on the other side of the world,

like a red flower streaming upward on its heavenly oils,

say, on a morning in early summer,

at its perfect imperial distance—

and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love—

do you think there is anywhere, in any language,

a word billowing enough

for the pleasure that fills you,

as the sun

reaches out,

as it warms you as you stand there,

empty-handed—

or have you too

turned from this world—
or have you too

gone crazy

for power,

for things?

~ Mary Oliver