the rapture of being alive

This one goes out to loons and Shane Hollander and those middle-of-the-night moments of clarity.

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 nest 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 lamplight
in which I am sitting.

                                    I do not close the book.

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

—Mary Oliver (1935-2019), "The Loon," from What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems (Da Capo Press, 2002) and in my case from Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (Penguin, 2017).