One Hundred White-sided Dolphins on a Summer Day

1.

Fat,

black, slick,

galloping in the pitch

of the waves, in the pearly

fields of the sea,

they leap toward us,

they rise, sparkling, and vanish, and rise sparkling,

they breathe little clouds of mist, they lift perpetual smile,

they slap their tails on the waves, grandmothers and grandfathers

enjoying the old jokes,

they circle around us,

they swim with us –

2.

a hundred white-sided dolphins

on a summer day,

each one, as God himself

could not appear more acceptable

a hundred times,

in a body blue and black threading through

the sea foam,

and lifting himself up from the opened

tents of the waves on his fishtail,

to look

with the moon of his eye

into my heart,

3.

and find there

pure, sudden, steep, sharp, painful

gratitude

that falls –

I don’t know – either

unbearable tons

or the pale, bearable hand

of salvation

on my neck,

lifting me

from the boat’s plain plank seat

into the world’s

4.

unspeakable kindness.

It is my sixty-third summer on earth

and, for a moment, I have almost vanished

into the body of the dolphin,

into the moon-eye of God,

into the white fan that lies at the bottom of the sea

with everything

that ever was, or ever will be,

supple, wild, rising on flank or fishtail –

singing or whistling or breathing damply through blowhole

at top of head.  Then, in our little boat, the dolphins suddenly gone,

we sailed on through the brisk, cheerful day.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(from What Do We Know?)