The Osprey

Allen W. Seaby

The Osprey

This morning
an osprey
with its narrow
black-and-white face

and its cupidinous eyes
leaned down
from a leafy tree
to look into the lake – it looked

a long time, then its powerful
shoulders punched out a little
and it fell,
it rippled down

into the water –
then it rose, carrying,
in the clips of its feet,
a slim and limber

silver fish, a scrim
of red rubies
on its flashing sides.
All of this

was wonderful
to look at,
so I simply stood there,
in the blue morning,

looking.
Then I walked away.
Beauty is my work,
but not my only work –

later,
when the fish was gone forever
and the bird was miles away,
I came back

and stood on the shore, thinking –
and if you think
thinking is a mild exercise,
beware!

I mean, I was swimming for my life –
and I was thundering this way and that way
in my shirt of feathers –
and I could not resolve anything long enough

to become one thing
except this: the imaginer.
It was inescapable
as over and over it flung me,

without pause or mercy it flung me
to both sides of the beautiful water –
to both sides
of the knife.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver died today. I’m sad there will not be new poems from that beautiful mind.
“Beauty is my work/ but not my only work.” She is always trying to imagine what it is like to be a bit of nature. For her, nature is something you enter into, something individual and a part of understanding what it means to be human. Here, she wears a shirt of feathers while swimming for her life! – and what a beautiful way to show her sense of being many things in many elements, and as yet unresolved, or perhaps, unfinished. And is that not true of us all?  Please God, may she now indeed have pause and mercy, and may there always be beauty and the work of it both for her and us.