Thursday, January 17, 2019

Sleeping in the Forest: RIP Mary Oliver


Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me what it is you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"

Mary Oliver was that rare oxymoron – a bestselling modern-day poet. Mass popularity in poetry is often not a sign of distinction or skill.  All too frequently it denotes a sort of pop sentiment that propagates and fades in a moment.

This is not the case with Oliver. There is something in her apparent simplicity and accessibility, in her earthy subject matter and powers of observation, in the primitive wisdom of quiet selfhood and oneness with nature that strikes a chord with the modern crowds of busy professionals and car-bound helicopter parents.  She sings us back to a human root that stretches beyond ourselves and into the earth, into an earlier version of thought where the earth was not a “resource”, not a mine to be stripped and plundered of its riches, but a great and menacing and wonderful mystery.  Her poems embrace that mystery, and the mysteries it echoes in ourselves.



I first encountered Oliver in a junior college Creative Writing class.  One of her poems was given as an example (of what I don’t recall, natural imagery perhaps). It was a watershed moment. Up to that time my experiences with late 20th century poets had been neutral and disinterested at best.  I had formed the opinion (on precious little experience) that it was pretentious stuff, mostly experimental and avant-garde in ways that alienated rather than attracted the reader.

The poem was “Wild Geese”, which remains one of her best-known and most ubiquitous poems, now almost a cliché in itself. But at the time it walloped me, and still does. The vibrant imagery – “the soft animal of your body”; “the sun and the clear pebbles of rain”; “the wild geese, high in the clean blue air” – sang of wildness and connection and human imperfection in a way that I had never encountered.

Oliver was a garden door that led me to discover there were many other incredible poets of that era – Seamus Heaney & Robert Bly, Wendell Berry & Raymond Carver; Maxine Kumin & Lisel Mueller, to scratch just the surface. I might never have ventured beyond the perimeter.

But it is Oliver I still come back to more than any of the others. She’s half sage, half wood nymph, going out to commune with the earth and somehow carry it back to the page.  Her quiet tree-songs soothe my soul, and that may be the greatest purpose that poetry can have.

"When Death Comes" by Mary Oliver (© 1992)



When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Saturday, January 12, 2019

Wintering Heights


So winter has finally arrived here in the Upper Midwest, at least for the present.  It had been something of the “winter that wasn’t”, two solid months of clouds and mud and bare ground with scarcely a flake of snow and only the morning frost to show the season.  I don’t complain, mind you.  I’m not a tremendous fan of biting cold and weekly snowstorms that bury the roads, but this whitewash of weekend snow is a welcome one.


We live in the countryside, miles from the nearest town, and there is nothing lovelier than a cold fresh blanket of white over the landscape.  It clings to the trees, mounds in the lee of buildings, sculpts itself into gravity-defying curved wing shapes jutting from the eaves. It gives contrast to the variety of trees.  The oaks are dark brown and red, still clinging to hundreds of rustling parchment leaves, while the snow lies like a narrow spine along the thick windward branches.  The hickories are leafless skeletons, splaying drooping phalanges outward and down as though reaching to scoop a palmful of powder.

The pines and spruce are the loveliest.  They capture the cascading flakes in their coat of needles, a frosting layer against the green.  Their limbs hiss in the wind and lean under the weight of their load, not so onerous today since the snow has a fine dry crispness to it rather than an overbearing sticky wetness.  They’ll shake the snow slowly over the next few days, like a dog climbing free of the bath, but for now they’re powdered sugar confections, a Christmas cliché come long past its time.

I stand at the kitchen window, making coffee and watching the snow swirl and drift from the garage roof.  The birds are in a frenzy at the feeders, bright as berries against the white. They come out en force in the snow – the winter-tawny goldfinches vying for a spot at the thistle feeder; the downy woodpeckers with a spot of crimson dark as blood on their heads; the gray and cream juncos crowding and hopping about in the snow, leaving shallow footprints as fine as hairs; the cardinals, electric scarlet and glowing like a Christmas bulb against the absence of color.  Flaring red coals, it seems almost preposterous these last should be able to hop softly about in the cold snow without leaving puddles of meltwater.

My son has been out already, leaving traceries of footprints amongst the drifts. He’s piled a pointed witch’s-hat of snow from the driveway in the front lawn and hollowed out the middle, creating a small triangular igloo, safe shelter from the wind.  I miss the days when the simplicity of such a structure felt sufficient for my own needs.

Tomorrow will be time enough to deal with the petty inconveniences of the snow. There will be time to wrap myself in layers to scrape clean the sidewalk and prep the mower to plow the looooong potholed driveway to the road for myself and the nearest neighbor.  This particular storm had good enough manners to arrive on a Saturday, when I could spend the day reading and bird-watching and soaking in the scenery beneath a warm blanket, mentally preparing myself for a few hours of unhurried snow clearing on a Sunday.

How wonderful when life can be taken at your own unhurried pace!

I just hope the next snow observes such decorum and etiquette.





Wednesday, January 9, 2019

A New Year's Resurrection


“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year.  It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.  Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.” G.K. Chesterton, The G.K. Chesterton Calendar

I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions, at least not the sort you crow about to friends and family and write down in shopping lists to take to the supermarket. They’ve always seemed a pseudo-commitment, the sort of “well, if it works out…” type of pledge that’s doomed to fail because it starts with the theory that a new year means somehow our less enlightened and motivated former selves have been shuffled off like old skins.

The truth, of course, is that a date on the calendar means nothing vastly significant in either the outer world or our inner one. Unless, as Chesterton mentions, we give it significance. Because nothing new starts without a first time.  Or a second.  Or a third.

So I’m resurrecting this little blog with a simple goal in mind.  To use it.  For book reviews, travelogues, reminiscences, fleeting thoughts, reflection, trolling, social experimentation, and to push my fringe right-wing agenda.  Okay, so those last three are lies.  But the others…

Maybe, just maybe, this will help energize me to write a little more often.  Or not.  But either way, as Chesterton says, a man must "start afresh".