Mary Oliver is so woven into the fabric of my life, I gasped when I heard the news she died. And I immediately thought of her poem “When Death Comes.”
When Death Comes
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.
It’s a weird thing. Mary Oliver is as successful a poet as you can get. Her stuff is “excerpted” through Pinterest, through Instagram … and if I hadn’t been into her already, and into her for years (I encountered her work via The New Yorker back in the 1990s) I might have been turned off by this. You know, the Oprah-fication quote-worthy cross-stitch feeling of it. Like, if it’s THIS popular, it’s probably not all that good. But her stuff strikes a chord. I’m sure you’ve all probably read her poem “Wild Geese” – that’s the one that starts with the line “You do not have to be good.” It’s everywhere.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
But … just because something is everywhere doesn’t mean it’s not good. The critical world kind of ignored her, even though she won the Pulitzer, her books were (are) literal best-sellers, etc. She is a well-loved contemporary poet. Like a Robert Frost of our time. Another thing that added to the general critical dismissal of her is that her poems are not “topical.” She writes nature poems, basically. You read her stuff and you get the feeling that she spent the majority of her time taking long walks. Then came home and wrote a poem about the ocean, or sunflowers, or whelks. This isn’t seen as “important.” It’s old-fashioned, a lady poet writing about flowers. I don’t mean that I AGREE with this assessment. I just mean that that’s the assessment that seemingly was out there. This New Yorker article is really intereseting about Mary Oliver and her detractors as well as her fans.
If you love Mary Oliver, as I do, you love her passionately.
There’s always a moment when her poems flash into transcendence, like when a gliding swan suddenly rears back stretching out its wings. It has that feeling to it.
Whelks
Here are the perfect
fans of the scallops,
quahogs, and weedy mussels
still holding their orange fruit —
and here are the whelks —
whirlwinds,
each the size of a fist,
but always cracked and broken —
clearly they have been traveling
under the sky-blue waves
for a long time.
All my life
I have been restless —
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss —
than wholeness —
than staying at home.
I have not been sure what it is.
But every morning on the wide shore
I pass what is perfect and shining
to look for the whelks, whose edges
have rubbed so long against the world
they have snapped and crumbled —
they have almost vanished,
with the last relinquishing
of their unrepeatable energy,
back into everything else.
When I find one
I hold it in my hand,
I look out over that shaking fire,
I shut my eyes. Not often,
but now and again there’s a moment
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.
Gannets
I am watching the white gannets
blaze down into the water
with the power of blunt spears
and a stunning accuracy —
even though the sea is riled and boiling
and gray with fog
and the fish are nowhere to be seen,
they fall, they explode into the water
like white gloves,
then they vanish,
then they climb out again,
from the cliff of the wave,
like white flowers —
and still I think
that nothing in this world moves
but as a positive power —
even the fish, finning down into the current
or collapsing
in the red purse of the beak,
are only interrupted from their own pursuit
of whatever it is
that fills their bellies —
and I say:
life is real,
and pain is real,
but death is an imposter,
and if I could be what once I was,
like the wolf or the bear
standing on the cold shore,
I would still see it —
how the fish simply escape, this time,
or how they slide down into a black fire
for a moment,
then rise from the water inseparable
from the gannets’ wings.
She has put voice to things I haven’t been able to even properly FEEL because the experience of whatever it is is so confusing. Or you resist looking at something. You resist facing something. She writes about death, and loss, and grief. Terribly traumatic experiences. But she does so in a way that gives those feelings a container, a space where the words can form and so you, the reader, can look at it and say, “Oh my God, yes. That is how I feel.” It’s deeply healing. There aren’t too many poets who have written poems that I cling to in tough times. Off the top of my head I can think of only three, Yeats, Auden and Mary Oliver. Each of these poets have written poems I have memorized, not from trying to memorize the poem, but from sheer repetition of reading, the sheer amount of times I have gone back again and again to their work.
I have written a lot about Auden’s “The More Loving One” and what it means to me, the relationship I have had with it, which now stretches back to high school when I first encountered it. That poem has been there for me. I have wrestled with it. I have accepted it. I have argued with it. I have rejected it in a tantrum. I wrote this insane essay over 10 years ago here called “The Total Dark Sublime” – the title taken from “The More Loving One” – and that essay was me wrestling with the poem and what it was telling me to do. Or … not what it was telling me to do, but just telling me this is the way things ARE. It’s one of those crazy essays I used to write, which sometimes I think, “Uhm, maybe delete that?” But oh well, will let it stand. Like, this is a lifelong relationship with a poem. Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods” is another poem like that for me. It holds such a special place in my heart it deserves to be called sacred. It has provided something for me, something I have NEEDED, something I keep forgetting (because forgetting is the human condition), something that has helped. It doesn’t help in a “everything will be okay” way, because the poem doesn’t say that at ALL (and I wouldn’t buy it if it did. Sell that shit to someone else. Everything is not and WILL not “be okay.”)
My Dad was not familiar with Mary Oliver’s work and so one day I recited “In Blackwater Woods” for him. I knew it by heart. In the last 2 stanzas, I heard him exhale – a whoosh of breath – and he said, “Boy, that’s a great poem.” If you knew Dad, you would know his reaction was a big deal. He was a deeply emotional man, but he tried to keep it in check. When he felt something, it was obvious in a 10-mile radius.
Years later, when we stood in a small fragile grieving group to bury his ashes, we each said something beforehand. Memories or thoughts. I read this poem. The connective tissue between reciting it for him and then reading it out loud in the vast absence he left behind was so strong I thought I might not be able to get through it. I also had no idea when I first recited it to him that it would end up being about my own feelings of loss when he left us.
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
This is what poets can do, at their most transcendent. They are muses, voices. They speak when we cannot. They see farther and deeper. Their ability to put experience into words helps beyond measure. It helps create a container for our lives, for our understanding of our lives.
Mary Oliver did that for me, more than any other living poet.
