ECSTATIC UNION
“Summer Story”
When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into the funnels
of the blossoms
and the tongue
leaps out
and throbs,
I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in this world
that aren’t
pieces of gold
or power——-
that nobody owns
or could buy even
for a hillside of money—–
that just float
in the world,
or drift over the fields,
or into the gardens,
and into the tents of the vines,
and now here I am
spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling,
so that I feel I am myself
a small bird with a terrible hunger,
with a thin beak probing and dipping
and a heart that races so fast
it is only a heart beat ahead of breaking——
and I am the hunger and the assuagement,
and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,
and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking.
— Mary Oliver
