{"id":142901,"date":"2019-01-17T23:05:45","date_gmt":"2019-01-18T04:05:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=142901"},"modified":"2019-01-17T23:35:07","modified_gmt":"2019-01-18T04:35:07","slug":"r-i-p-mary-oliver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=142901","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P. Mary Oliver"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nMary Oliver is so woven into the fabric of my life, I gasped when I heard the news she died<\/a>. And I immediately thought of her poem “When Death Comes.”<\/p>\n

When Death Comes<\/h3>\n

When death comes
\nlike the hungry bear in autumn;
\nwhen death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse<\/p>\n

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
\nwhen death comes
\nlike the measle-pox<\/p>\n

when death comes
\nlike an iceberg between the shoulder blades,<\/p>\n

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
\nwhat is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?<\/p>\n

And therefore I look upon everything
\nas a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
\nand I look upon time as no more than an idea,
\nand I consider eternity as another possibility,<\/p>\n

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
\nas a field daisy, and as singular,<\/p>\n

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
\ntending, as all music does, toward silence,<\/p>\n

and each body a lion of courage, and something
\nprecious to the earth.<\/p>\n

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
\nI was a bride married to amazement.
\nI was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.<\/p>\n

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
\nif I have made of my life something particular, and real.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
\nor full of argument.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nIt’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<\/i>. <\/p>\n

Wild Geese<\/h3>\n

You do not have to be good.
\nYou do not have to walk on your knees
\nfor a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
\nYou only have to let the soft animal of your body
\nlove what it loves.
\nTell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
\nMeanwhile the world goes on.
\nMeanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
\nare moving across the landscapes,
\nover the prairies and the deep trees,
\nthe mountains and the rivers.
\nMeanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
\nare heading home again.
\nWhoever you are, no matter how lonely,
\nthe world offers itself to your imagination,
\ncalls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
\nover and over announcing your place
\nin the family of things.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> is really intereseting about Mary Oliver and her detractors as well as her fans. <\/p>\n

If you love Mary Oliver, as I do, you love her passionately. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Whelks<\/h3>\n

Here are the perfect
\nfans of the scallops,
\nquahogs, and weedy mussels
\nstill holding their orange fruit \u2014
\nand here are the whelks \u2014
\nwhirlwinds,
\neach the size of a fist,
\nbut always cracked and broken \u2014
\nclearly they have been traveling
\nunder the sky-blue waves
\nfor a long time.
\nAll my life
\nI have been restless \u2014
\nI have felt there is something
\nmore wonderful than gloss \u2014
\nthan wholeness \u2014
\nthan staying at home.
\nI have not been sure what it is.
\nBut every morning on the wide shore
\nI pass what is perfect and shining
\nto look for the whelks, whose edges
\nhave rubbed so long against the world
\nthey have snapped and crumbled \u2014
\nthey have almost vanished,
\nwith the last relinquishing
\nof their unrepeatable energy,
\nback into everything else.
\nWhen I find one
\nI hold it in my hand,
\nI look out over that shaking fire,
\nI shut my eyes. Not often,
\nbut now and again there\u2019s a moment
\nwhen the heart cries aloud:
\nyes, I am willing to be
\nthat wild darkness,
\nthat long, blue body of light.<\/p>\n

Gannets<\/h3>\n

I am watching the white gannets
\nblaze down into the water
\nwith the power of blunt spears
\nand a stunning accuracy \u2014
\neven though the sea is riled and boiling
\nand gray with fog
\nand the fish are nowhere to be seen,
\nthey fall, they explode into the water
\nlike white gloves,
\nthen they vanish,
\nthen they climb out again,
\nfrom the cliff of the wave,
\nlike white flowers \u2014
\nand still I think
\nthat nothing in this world moves
\nbut as a positive power \u2014
\neven the fish, finning down into the current
\nor collapsing
\nin the red purse of the beak,
\nare only interrupted from their own pursuit
\nof whatever it is
\nthat fills their bellies \u2014
\nand I say:
\nlife is real,
\nand pain is real,
\nbut death is an imposter,
\nand if I could be what once I was,
\nlike the wolf or the bear
\nstanding on the cold shore,
\nI would still see it \u2014
\nhow the fish simply escape, this time,
\nor how they slide down into a black fire
\nfor a moment,
\nthen rise from the water inseparable
\nfrom the gannets\u2019 wings.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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.”) <\/p>\n

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 \u2013 a whoosh of breath \u2013 and he said, \u201cBoy, that\u2019s a great poem.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In Blackwater Woods<\/h3>\n

Look, the trees
\nare turning
\ntheir own bodies
\ninto pillars<\/p>\n

of light,
\nare giving off the rich
\nfragrance of cinnamon
\nand fulfillment,<\/p>\n

the long tapers
\nof cattails
\nare bursting and floating away over
\nthe blue shoulders<\/p>\n

of the ponds,
\nand every pond,
\nno matter what its
\nname is, is<\/p>\n

nameless now.
\nEvery year
\neverything
\nI have ever learned<\/p>\n

in my lifetime
\nleads back to this: the fires
\nand the black river of loss
\nwhose other side<\/p>\n

is salvation,
\nwhose meaning
\nnone of us will ever know.
\nTo live in this world<\/p>\n

you must be able
\nto do three things:
\nto love what is mortal;
\nto hold it<\/p>\n

against your bones knowing
\nyour own life depends on it;
\nand, when the time comes to let it go,
\nto let it go.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Mary Oliver did that for me, more than any other living poet. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,9],"tags":[254,160],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142901"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142916,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142901\/revisions\/142916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}