A Poet Reflects

8.

The poem is not the world.
It isn’t even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.

It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.

—Mary Oliver, section 8 of “Flare” in The Leaf and the Cloud: A Poem (Da Capo Press, 2000)