Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Nostrils Soft as Violets

Dear Readers,
I heard this poem -- a love poem to a place, as much as anything I've ever read -- on NPR radio this morning and thought you'd like it as much as I did.
Reminder: Drawing for autographed WILD HORSE ISLAND covers is this week. If you get an email from me requesting your snail mail address, please ask your parents if you can accept.
Enjoy...

The Poet Goes to Indiana
by Mary Oliver

I'll tell you a half-dozen things
that happened to me
in Indiana
when I went that far west to teach.
You tell me if it was worth it.

I lived in the country
with my dog—
part of the bargain of coming.
And there was a pond
with fish from, I think, China.
I felt them sometimes against my feet.
Also, they crept out of the pond, along its edges,
to eat the grass.
I'm not lying.
And I saw coyotes,
two of them, at dawn, running over the seemingly
unenclosed fields.
And once a deer, but a buck, thick-necked, leaped
into the road just-oh, I mean just, in front of my car—
and we both made it home safe.
And once the blacksmith came to care for the four horses,
or the three horses that belonged to the owner of the house,
and I bargained with him, if I could catch the fourth,
he, too, would have hooves trimmed
for the Indiana winter,
and apples did it,
and a rope over the neck did it,
so I won something wonderful;
and there was, one morning,
an owl
flying, oh pale angel, into
the hay loft of a barn,
I see it still;
and there was once, oh wonderful,
a new horse in the pasture,
a tall, slim being-a neighbor was keeping her there—
and she put her face against my face,
put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets,
against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me,
to see who I was,
a long quiet minute-minutes—
then she stamped feet and whisked tail
and danced deliciously into the grass away, and came back.
She was saying, so plainly, that I was good, or good enough.
Such a fine time I had teaching in Indiana.

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Posted by Terri Farley @ 8:29 AM

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Comments: That was a great poem. Very wild horse ilsandish.
  I loved it, too!
Now, every time a horse nuzzles me, I think of the violet petal nostrils!
  Me too!
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