ALLIGATOR POEM
—Mary Oliver
—Mary Oliver
I knelt down
at the edge of the water,
and if the white birds
standing
in the tops of the trees
whistled any warning
I didn’t understand,
I drank up to the very
moment it came
crashing toward me,
its tail flailing
like a bundle of swords,
slashing the grass,
and the inside of its
cradle-shaped mouth
gaping,
and rimmed with teeth—
and that’s how I almost
died
of foolishness
in beautiful Florida.
But I didn’t.
I leaped aside, and fell,
and it streamed past me,
crushing everything in its path
as it swept down to the
water
and threw itself in,
and, in the end,
this isn’t a poem about
foolishness
but about how I rose from
the ground
and saw the world as if
for the second time,
the way it really is.
The water, that circle of
shattered glass,
healed itself with a slow
whisper
and lay back
with the back-lit light of
polished steel,
and the birds, in the
endless waterfalls of the trees,
shook open the snowy
pleats of their wings, and drifted away,
while, for a keepsake, and
to steady myself,
I reached out,
I picked the wild flowers
from the grass around me—
blue stars
and blood-red trumpets
on long green stems—
for hours in my trembling
hands they glittered
like fire.
___________________
—Medusa
