from "winter hours" by mary oliver

Another present for you, while I try to remember what it means to have a blog.

I.
I think a great deal about Shelley's boat, a little world sailing upon the greater world, to whose laws it must, of necessity, submit. As we know, it soon carried Shelley to his death, and his friend Edward Williams and the boy Charles Vivian as well. The details we do not know, whether it was the wind mainly or altogether, or the leafy waves, or the wind and the waves together, or a larger boat bearing down through the sudden storm. But this we do know. Before it happened, I mean when they left land and sailed away over the Aegean, in the clear summer air, on the untroubled sea, the boat must have looked like a white bird, a swan, floating so lightly and rapidly it was all but flying. And sailing in it must have seemed like entering, with justifiable exhilaration and total faith, an even larger, lovelier, statelier and steadier world than the manifest ocean. As, perhaps, it was.

II.
There are as many worlds as there are imaginers. Down-shore there rests in the restless water a sailboat; one line holds it from leaping away. Little bell, little chain, little this and that, on it, taps and clanks in the wind. I stand and listen. Its bow, built of boards steamed to a sweet curve and join, like a bird's breast, tugs against the line. What is it it wants to be? Once, in Union, Maine, as we were passing a field, five white birch trees became five white ponies. Their feet shuffled in the long grass, their white faces shone. This is called: happiness. This is called: stay away from me with your inches, and your savings accounts, and your plums in a jar. Your definitive anything. And if life is so various, so shifting, what could we possibly say of death, that black leaf, that has in it any believable finality?