mary oliver "first snow"

"i am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination." -- john keats. in mary oliver's writing there is a sense of the melding of romance and an understanding of nature articulated through her imagination. for example, in the poem i would like to share with you today, mary has a sense of snow that marries the flow of thought with the experience of being inside the falling snow itself. as i read this a flood of images and experiences passes through me.

the snow 
began here

this morning and all day

continued,
its white

rhetoric everywhere

calling us back to why,
how,

whence such beauty and what

the meaning;
such

an oracular fever!
flowing 
past windows,
an energy it seemed

would never ebb,
never settle

less than lovely!
and only now,

deep into night,

it has finally ended.
the silence

is immense,

and the heavens still hold

a million candles;
nowhere 
the familiar things:

stars, the moon, 
the darkness
we expect

and nightly turn from.
trees 
glitter like castles

of ribbons, the broad fields

smolder with light, a passing

creekbed lies

heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions

that have assailed us all day

remain--not a single

answer has been found--
walking out now

into the silence and the light

under the trees,

and through the fields,

feels like one.

mary oliver, "first snow," from new and selected poems, beacon press, 1992.