Up until March, I was only aware of Mary Oliver’s writing through fragments read on blogs, having only been familiar with “Wild Geese” as a complete poem when I first started taking interest in English poetry. I grew up surrounded by 18th and 19th century French poets, and it is only recently that I have felt sufficiently at home in the English language to open a collection of poems. Poetry is the realm of images: with fiction, even when I was still struggling with basic idioms and sentence structure, I could grasp at the plotline and fight my way through a book. Poetry required far more patience, but as I am only starting to read Mary Oliver while entering my twenties, I feel incredibly lucky that it was far out of reach before this.
I imagine myself at age 13, reading her poems about her dog Percy, about going on walks alone in the woods and listening to the world as it moves and wakes and I know that they would not have soothed the wounded teenager I was. I would have been at best annoyed, at worst harsh and cruel to her words. Now, I sit on some Sundays and read my way slowly through her oeuvre. I do this enough that my mind is now equipped with what I think of as the Mary Oliver window, the one that looks onto the world and realizes how cruel it is but still understands its beauty, and allows me to be moved by the simplest things: the year’s first strawberries, a perfectly shaped patch of sun on my dirty floor, someone struggling with a melody on a piano nearby.
As I am tending to my bruises and learning to be better to myself and others, I am starting to understand that kindness is not really something you are (and even less so an inherent human trait). Mary Oliver’s eyes and words are kind to all that surround her: to the kingfisher and to Percy and to small berries and to the stones that stand close to each other. To Queen Ann’s lace, of which she says:
“how it/stands straight on its/thin stems how it/scrubs its white faces/with the
rags of the sun how it/makes all the/loveliness/it can.”
And isn’t that the most wonderful image? I try to hold myself to such kindness, to make my language worthy of the people and things I love and deem beautiful. The manifestation of love I choose to make mine is one that betters me because it makes me kind, careful with the things I hold and tender with the world as a whole. It is one that I have started seeing in my writing, in my conversations: it is a kind of love that calls for me to pay attention, to see beauty and hold it and make my words in its image!
To even the most hopeless questions, Mary Oliver has found either answers or ways to satisfy her heart. She has learned to understand that the world cares only very little for her, that it holds knowledge she will never come near. That nature, in the very things she loves, is cruel. I chose five things Mary Oliver has said (most of these from “Swan”, which is my most recent read) to try and explain the imprint they have left on my mind.
“Though I have been scorned for it/let me never be afraid of using the word beautiful”
I feel like this phrase should not be taken out of the beautiful poem it is contained in, which I cannot quote in full. But these are words romantic comedies have taught us were sacred: pretty and beautiful are not the same thing, and love is sacred, a word that becomes meaningless when repeated too often, which is baseless. Repetition is the very foundation of prayer. You repeat the same phrase, the same word until it moulds itself under your tongue and becomes music, and becomes sacred. Love is the same, and its meaning has a way of building itself through sincere repetition.
“If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much”
This was said after explaining that going to the woods is something the poet only really enjoys in complete solitude, and I think it explains something incredibly tender about love: that it will make you invite the one(s) you love into even the most silent parts of your soul, the ones you have never let anyone see (out of fear of disinterest? Fear of them fleeing when they realize what your loneliness is made up of?). This is intimacy: here is my soul for you to hold, here is who I am when nobody is there to see. Here is the space I carved and carefully closed up around myself, and here is the door held open.
“On the beach, at dawn:/four small stones/clearly hugging each other”
I started crying at this specific point while reading “Swan” because I was absolutely overwhelmed by the image. I can’t explain how it is that sometimes a certain combination of words just makes me feel like someone lifted the veil for a few moments and the world is new and sudden and there for me to look at.
“Inside the river there is an unfinishable story /and you are somewhere in it/and it will never end until all ends./ Take your busy heart to the art museum and the/chamber of commerce/but take it also to the forest.”
It is like this: there is a song the world is singing, and even if you are not born knowing how to sing, your body and mind know how to join in. I do not know what Mary Oliver’s understanding of God was: through the five collections of poems I’ve read of hers, I’ve seen her address them in various ways, and often imply that they were everywhere, in the leaves and the branches and the rivers. Regardless, my own struggle with spirituality has left me both devastated by the lack of meaning my existence holds, and overjoyed by the possibility it allows. And while this isn’t an answer, it voices something reassuring: there is a place for me in the world, one my body carves for itself in nature, and nature itself acts as a reminder for that.
“For some things there are no wrong reasons which is what I dream of for me”
When I read this I felt the way you read something and decide to get a tattoo of it. I still think about it, and I know I’m just going to be carrying it around for a while, sometimes taking it out of my pocket to show my friends and say: look at this, isn’t it so beautiful and isn’t it so true and aren’t these words an echo to something you are carrying much deeper.
Poetry (Mary Oliver) has a way of holding up things to our attention that are within our reach, things that are inherent to being a person and asking us to look, and asking us to care. I’ve tried (and failed at) writing Mary Oliver a long posthumous letter and ultimately started writing this instead. I only ever wanted to express how thankful I felt to have known her mind, and to have been allowed to live inside her writing.
