Beauty

My birthday passed a couple of weeks ago, and Colin gave me two beautiful gifts:  a very fancy new camera, with which I took the photos below and will take countless more, and a new favorite poem by Mary Oliver.  The poem is about beauty, the kind that, if you're lucky and tuned in, colors ordinary days and monochrome nights.  Not the rare bird, but the swan.

These weeks have been full of work and travel, visitors and one incredible party.  And running a marathon(!).

The Swan

Did you see it, drifting all night on the Black River?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air?
An armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lillies,
biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music---like the rain pelting the tress---like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds---
a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you, too, finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

-Mary Oliver