From Mary Oliver’s new book Upstream. (This was from her Faceboko page; I don’t own the book. Yet.) As we slide into the darkest part of the year, keep hoping. Keep fighting.
Category: Mary Oliver
Poem For The Theme
Mary Oliver sums up the “make it count” feelings. I love the “each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth” line.
When Death Comes
Mary Oliver
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.
Life Advice
From Mary Oliver:
“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
From a hike in upper Millcreek yesterday, lots of things to be astonished about:
Mary Oliver Interviewed
Mary Oliver, media-shy and often quoted around here, gave an interview and short reading to the radio show On Being recently, which you can find right here. She talks a little more about her early life (“I got saved by the beauty of the world”) and her recent move to Florida, but the most exciting things for me were her talking about her new work. She quotes from the beginning of a new poem:
“Things take the time they take. don’t worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?”
Perfect.
My second favorite part? Her reading of “Wild Geese.”
Don’t Hesitate
Some advice via prose poem from Mary Oliver:
Don’t Hesitate
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
A Poem About Canning
Here’s a poem about making jam (which will happen tonight) and about grandmothers. My own grandmother is not doing well; if you have a good thought to send to her or the universe, she and I and my family would be grateful.
This is by Mary Oliver.
Answers
If I envy anyone it must be
My grandmother in a long ago
Green summer, who hurried
Between kitchen and orchard on small
Uneducated feet, and took easily
All shining fruits into her eager hands.
That summer I hurried too, wakened
To books and music and circling philosophies.
I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers
That could not solve the mystery of the trees.
My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career:
So to please her I studied – but I will remember always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year.
Time For Some Mary Oliver
Here’s a poem about dogs (or cats!) and about being steadfast, a good word.
How It Is with Us, and How It Is with Them
by Mary Oliver
We become religious,
then we turn from it,
then we are in need and maybe we turn back.
We turn to making money,
then we turn to the moral life,
then we think about money again.
We meet wonderful people, but lose them
in our busyness.
We’re, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much.
Poem For The Sun
“Best preacher that ever was”–my thoughts exactly on sunshine. (Not so much the waking early for me, though.)
Why I Wake Early
by Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and crotchety—
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light—
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.
Happy Belated Birthday, Mary Oliver
It was poet Mary Oliver’s birthday yesterday. Here is a poem about being resigned to fall, which I could use some help with:
Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
Again
How about “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver again? There are geese in the field behind the office park and they were flying last night and I saw the leader look back over his goose shoulder to check on the rest of the V. So: goose poem.
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.