Blue Enquiry

... This skin you wear
so neatly, in which
you settle so brightly
on the summer grass, how
shall I know it?
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 tough 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.

-- Mary Oliver, from “The Gardens,” 2d section
in American Primitive


BLUE ENQUIRY

March 12, 2006

I do not discover,
I remember.
She came into the
downstairs bedroom
where I had gone back
to sleep, some moist
blue silk lifted
from the my
secret sacred history.
She might have been
the Bond girl I
always wished
for, a swell both
Barbie Benton and
that girl who sat
next to me in my
10th grade typing
class, her beauty
like walled country
I would never cross.
The woman I dreamed
had that tidal
blue sweetness just
offshore my actual
life, yet she was
so familiar to me
she might have been
some inside of my
wife sleeping deeply
in our bed upstairs.
She twined around
me naked and tight
and asked me about
her man, that perplex
ruse of stone and North
Sea surf and iron hot
from the forge. I tried
to tell her how
apt he is at boxing
and then shelving
every matter of
the day except
in matters sexual,
a thrall which
whelms every room
of night and day
with seething, pent
and urgent waters.
In just that way
men seem like women,
I said, though, saying
it, it seemed to
me that in that
way we’re exactly
different, women
managing (or needing?)
to keep sex on a high shelf
discreetly out of reach,
difficult to open
and hastily reshelved.
How this could be
helping my marriage
is anyone’s guess, her
perfect naked body
seamed tight against
mine, drawing this
supernal information
from me like it was
the inside kernal
of hot kisses and
thrusting seed. And
yet it was clear
in the dream that
this was pure and
simple enquiry, informing
my past as I rediscovered
it, there in a room I
do not dream but fly
through, carrying
heaven back into
this day. It’s 5:30 a.m.
now, sprinklers outside
whirring the garden
& my wife now yawning
upstairs & something
most old and new in my hand
which I must spread
across the soles of
her feet lightly,
gently, with all the
urgency of those
distant days of spring
now everywhere at once.