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[quote=Anonymous]As long as we are posting about Mary Oliver, there is this: Poem For My Fathers Ghost.

Now is my father
A traveler, like all the bold men
He talked of, endlessly
And with boundless admiration,
Over the supper table,
Or gazing up from his white pillow –
Book on his lap, always, until
Even that grew too heavy to hold.
Now is my father free of all binding fevers
Now is my father
Traveling where there is no road
Finally, he could not lift a hand
To cover his eyes.
Now he climbs to the eye of the river,
He strides through the Dakotas,
He disappears into the mountains.
And though he looks
Cold and hungry as any man
At the end of a questing season,
He is one of them now: 
He cannot be stopped.
Now is my father
Walking the wind,
Sniffing the deep Pacific
That begins at the end of the world.
Vanished from us utterly,
Now is my father circling the deepest forest –
Then turning in to the last red campfire burning
In the final hills,
Where chieftains, warriors and heroes
Rise and make him welcome,
Recognizing, under the shambles of his body,
A brother who has walked his thousand miles.

"Written after his death, this poem, an elegy to Oliver’s father is, in the words of Matthew Gindin, a poem whose shattering generosity – given that Oliver’s father sexually abused her when she was a child – can produce nothing but a kind of stunned reverence.  Perhaps this could serve as a reminder to us that love can and does conquer all..."

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