The Loon (Monday Poem)

 by Mary Oliver

 Not quite four a.m., when the rapture of being alive

strikes me from sleep, and I rise

from the comfortable bed and go

to another room, where my books are lined up

in their neat and colorful rows. How

magical they are! I choose one

and open it. Soon

I have wandered in over the waves of the words

 to the temple of thought.

                                            And then I hear

outside, over the actual waves, the small,

perfect voice of the loon. He is also awake,

and with his heavy head uplifted he calls out

to the fading moon, to the pink flush

swelling in the east that, soon,

will become the long, reasonable day.

                                                           Inside the house

it is still dark, except for the pool of lamploght

in which I am sitting.

                                    I do not close the book.

Neither, for a long while, do I read. on.

from Devotions: the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

Penguin, 2017