25 February 2019 Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver, 83-year-old poet, who won the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize (1984), died this past 17 January. The New York Times hailed her as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet. (Dwight Garner, February 2007). She produced poems about everyday life and the pristine splendor of nature. I’ve chosen to share in this post selections from her nature poems: geese, owls, and the deep woods. Many good reasons exist for her readers’ wide admiration. Unlike too much poetry, her work is straightforward and loving. Her unabashed enthusiasm for living seem to leap off the page coloring the simple days of human beings, of their spiritual centers, and of the sentient beings that co-exist with them. Some called her naïve. Her fans thought of her as accessible.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she was the daughter of Edward Oliver, a schoolteacher, and Helen (nee Vlasak), a secretary. Though she gave few interviews, in one of them Oliver alluded to childhood abuse, although she did not elaborate. It is clear that an unhappy childhood led her into the world of words, where she was glad to remain, a reader and writer with a superb affinity for the natural world, a poet with a strong transcendentalist streak – in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Although enamored with life and nature, Oliver did not shy away from more serious topics – even the most serious: death. One critic described it as follows: “This [poetry] is about living into one’s death, emptying oneself of oneself. It is about letting the work of nature follow its course, so that the work of decomposition presents a kind of “luminous doom”. There is something comforting in this, as in almost all of Oliver’s poems, even the darkest ones.” Another stated, “Oliver . . . sells out when she appears in lecture halls, and her poems feel so utterly at home in their pliant skin that one can almost imagine her sitting on a riverbank, in any season, pencil or fountain pen in hand as she, with deliberate, reverent lightness, puts letter to page.” A third said, “No one should go to Mary Oliver’s poems to be challenged, and that’s all right. There’s nothing criminal about being soothed by an often tenderly crafted Oliver composition.”

Here are a few poems from the world, a work of art, as she saw it.

Franz Marc’s Blue Horses

I step into the painting of the four blue horses.
I am not even surprised that I can do this.

One of the horses walks toward me.
His blue nose noses me lightly. I put my arm
over his blue mane, not holding on, just
commingling.
He allows me my pleasure.
Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain.
I would rather die than explain to the blue horses
what war is.
They would either faint in horror, or simply
find it impossible to believe.
I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
Now all four horses have come closer,
are bending their faces toward me
as if they have secrets to tell.
I don’t expect them to speak, and they don’t.
If being so beautiful isn’t enough, what
could they possibly say?

From Blue Horses by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by arrangement of Penguin Press, part of the Penguin Random House company. Copyright 2014 by Mary Oliver.

White Owl Flies Into And Out Of The Field

Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings—five feet apart—
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow—
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows—
so I thought:
maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us—
as soft as feathers—
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light—
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

“White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field” by Mary Oliver from Owls and Other Fantasies, Beacon PressBoston.

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.

“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

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.

“Wild Geese.” Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (Penguin Press, 2017)