Our
hymnbook Singing the Living Tradition,
published in 1993, constitutes a
truly remarkable resource for pithy, compact, eloquent, and moving pronouncements
on matters of importance in our day to day lives and in the larger world. The collection also brings the writers,
famous and not so famous men and women, dead and alive, into our consciousness
as fellow seekers, leaders, and thinkers.
In many cases each has had a hand in shaping our movement in the past or
in the now. Yet what a loss to us as
religious explorers if all we know of these great men and women are the
fragments of thought which pop up in orders of service on Sundays. I was lucky enough to become acquainted with
the poetry of Mary Oliver in the early eighties when my poet Dad was
introducing her writing to budding young women writers. I was just out of college. All the Mary Oliver he owned then came into
my collection when he died in 1993, perhaps a half-dozen slim volumes. By that time everybody was beginning to
notice her poems, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award folks among
them.
If
your experience has been anything like mine, you will have heard and read the Oliver
selections in the hymnal often over your years in our churches. If you haven’t, well then lucky you, you have
a treat in store for you! The three we
all have at hand on Sunday mornings these days are truly outstanding examples
of this poet’s work. The poem “Wild
Geese” is #490 in the section Meditations and Prayers. Because it is arranged for responsive
reading, we don’t very often hear this poem read as it was written, to be heard
in the one voice the poet gives to human-goose-rain-earth, to the body of the
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.
(New and Selected Poems, p. 110)
In the section in
the hymnbook on “Seasons and Cycles,” # 536 is the entire text of “Morning
Poem,” also arranged so as to make
responsive reading an option. In this
poem, the poet’s voice makes a sanctuary of the promise of renewal each morning
holds, sanctuary for even the heavy-hearted, “a prayer heard and
answered/lavishly,/every morning,/whether or not/you have ever dared to be
happy,/whether or not/you have ever dared to pray” (New and Selected Poems, p. 107).
The third Mary Oliver selection, included among “Benedictions and
Closing Words” (#696), consists of the last nine lines of the poem “In Blackwater Woods,” a poem which takes up the common Oliver
theme of the relationship between loss and salvation, the awful and awesome
balance between the aching beauty of life and the certainty of its
passing. These lines are carved into the
stone of the wall of our
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.
American Primitive (1983), p. 82
We
Unitarian Universalists have included Mary Oliver in
our canon, and the three poems we chose a decade ago do, in many respects,
represent both her core principles
and some of ours:
·
that our bodies are
the bodies of animals which have a place in a larger family of creatures who
love what they love.
· that the earth and the living and inanimate beings upon it begin again each minute, each day, each year, each generation, regardless of… anything, and we proclaim the sacred continuously.
· that what is mortal is astonishingly beautiful and deeply precious, both in the living and in the dying, in the having and the losing.
Hers
is a rare voice among our UU resources proclaiming the paradoxical sacredness of
living bodies—the seeing, hearing, fearing, killing & eating, fleeing &
chasing, sleeping, grieving, loving flesh that dies and rots and is born anew
into what seems an eternal arc of creation.
Since 1992, five new books of poems, prose poems, and prose compositions
have appeared. In this new body of
writing, I have noticed a coalescence of thought about the relationship of the
human body to the natural world as well as a shift in the poet’s priorities and
interests. The excerpt from the poem “Rhapsody” which we read responsively just
now is an example of this new movement in her thought. It is this I want to explore that with you a
little this morning.
The way I see the world and my identity and
responsibility as an environmentalist have been deeply affected by my long
evenings reading Mary Oliver’s poetry out loud to myself and whoever else would
listen. In her latest books Mary Oliver is writing
about being in her sixties. For a long,
long time she has been going out every day, sometimes with beloved dogs and
sometimes alone, in all kinds of weather, into the pine and oak forests and
beaches, around the ponds and over the dunes, and through the swamps that are
the features of the narrow low land at the tip of Cape Cod.
“Every
poem I write,” (this is from the reflection at the top of your Order of
Service) “must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must
have a spiritual purpose.” The observed and felt itself is captured in what she
calls the “fluid and breathing body” of the poem, “not language but the content
of language” (A Poetry Handbook,
p.3). Oliver’s poems do breathe. The inspiration
(like a gasp) is the remembering of the details of the experience; the expiration (like a sigh) is the blurring
of the boundary between “us” and “them,” and the arising of another
reality—union. In a way this is not
entirely new. For example, in “The
Fish”: “I opened his body and separated/ the flesh from the bones/and ate him.
Now the sea/ is in me: I am the fish, the fish/ glitters in me; we are/ risen,
tangled together, certain to fall/ back into the sea (New and Selected, p.165). Of
fish swallowed by gannets in “Gannets”: “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 inseparable/ from the gannets’ wings (New and Selected, p. 29).”
Of Mary Oliver, falling asleep in the fields at night, and awakening to
find herself nearly flower in “White Flowers”: Never in my life/ had I felt
myself so near/ that porous line/ where my own body was done with/ and the
roots and the stems and the flowers/began (New
and Selected, p. 59). But hear the
change in this gorgeous poem from her latest book What Do We Know (2002).
One-Hundred White-sided Dolphins on a Summer Day
1.
Fat,
black, slick,
galloping in the pitch
of the waves, in the pearly
fields of the sea,
they leap towards us,
they rise, sparkling, and vanish, and rise sparkling,
they breathe little clouds of mist, they lift perpetual
smiles,
they slap their tails on the waves, grandmothers and
grandfathers
enjoying the old jokes,
they circle around us,
they swim with us—
2.
a hundred white-sided dolphins
on a summer day,
each one, as God himself
could not appear more acceptable
a hundred times,
in a body blue and black threading through
the sea foam,
and lifting himself up from the opened
tents of the waves on his fishtail,
to look
with the moon of his eye
into my heart,
3.
and find there
pure, sudden, steep, sharp, painful
gratitude
that falls—
I don’t know—either
unbearable tons
or the pale, bearable hand
of salvation
on my neck,
lifting me
from the boat’s plain plank seat
into the world’s
4.
unspeakable kindness.
It is my sixty-third summer on earth
and, for a moment, I have almost vanished
into the body of the dolphin,
into the moon-eye of God,
into the white fan that lies at the bottom of the sea
with everything
that ever was, or ever will be,
supple, wild, rising on flank or fishtail—
singing or whistling or breathing damply through blowhole
at top of head.
Then, in our little boat, the dolphins suddenly gone,
we sailed on through the brisk, cheerful day.
The
poem is shaped like this [motion with hands away from body, double scalloped
lines moving toward and away from each other].
This is one way of many it works to capture the dolphins’ movement
through the water, the rhythm of their breathing—the details of what Oliver heard
and saw and felt that day. It captures
the merging in the body of the poem.
Listen to this one from West Wind (1997):
Fox
You
don’t ever know where
a
sentence will take you, depending
on its
roll and fold. I was walking
over the dunes
when I saw
the red
fox asleep under the green
branches
of the pine. It flared up
in the
sweet order of its being,
the tail
that was over the muzzle
lifting
in airy amazement
and the
fire of the eyes followed
and the
pricked ears and the thin
barrel
body and the four
athletic
legs in their black stockings and it
came to
me how the polish of the world changes
everything,
I was hot I was cold I was almost
dead of
delight. Of course the mind keeps
cool in
its hidden palace—yes, the mind takes
a long
time, is otherwise occupied than by
happiness,
and deep breathing.
Still,
at last, it comes too, running
like a
wild thing, to be taken
with its
twin sister breath. So I stood
on the
pale, peach-colored sand, watching the fox
as it
opened like a flower, and I began
softly,
to pick among the vast assortment of words
that it
should run again and again across the page
that you
again and again should shiver with praise.
To “nearly die of
delight” is to be enraptured, to be snatched up by a fierce and passionate
love. I am thinking of the excerpt from The Leaf and the Cloud called “Rhapsody”
we read together earlier. Lately, Mary
Oliver has become more willing to speak publicly about her own life after years
of shunning the curious and maintaining a more or less reclusive life observing
and writing about life in the grasses and ponds and pitch pine forests near her
home. In recent work she has begun to
write a little about her partner of thirty + years, Molly Malone Cook, to whom
she has for a long time been dedicating her books. Of that relationship she writes in Winter Hours: Prose, Prose poems, and Poems (1999):
We are happy, and
we are lucky. We make for each other:
companionship, intimacy, affection, rhapsody. Whenever I hear of something horrible, I want
to cover [her] ears. Whenever I see
something beautiful, and my heart is shouting, it is [her] I run to, to tell
about it.
Accompanying this new openness, poems have appeared in which human life and human love, human emotional needs and graces, find their way into the body of the poem and effect a reciprocal commentary on natural processes and the process of writing poems. I think that her acknowledgement at last of the depth of love between humans has been instrumental in creating a spiritual shift for her.
“Rhapsody,” is a love poem—but a love poem of a different order, a love poem of many different orders. The poem begins with seed heads and Time; a fox, at home under the roses; swimming muskrat, singing bluebird, and sleeping ant. Where we began our shared reading, the poet “homes in” to speak from human relationship—partner to her partner. I [indicating myself and paraphrasing the reading’s opening lines] am so busy with Emerson, the poet begins, but sometimes I look up, get up (“a person must”) and call your name [indicating congregation], “or maybe you whisper mine.”
The poet asks if we have seen the rose buds which, “besieged /by another idea,” open “their wild faces” to “the bunched bee in the blossoms, doing its work, entering and emerging.” We do this for one another here in this church, in worship, play, and work, moving in and out of one another’s hearts and minds, cross-pollinating, ensuring renewal and creativity. I hear in this echoes of what she has written about Molly, about wanting to ease her way through life. You may hear it too. “[I]f you are sad, I will not dress myself in desolation./ I will present myself with all the laughters I can muster./ And if you are angry I will come, calm and steady, with/ some small and easy story.” Do we not covenant to do this for one another, to offer what is needed for nurture and comfort? We are the body of a poem; we contain this summer, these roses, these creatures.
In between these movements of the poem, there is a blessing of the body. Whose body? The body of the bee, for one, at least in the darting, in the little hairs. The body of the rose, for two, in the fire, perhaps, but surely in the hips and mouth. The human body, for sure, in every line, all our parts, even that famous opposable thumb. And—here is where I have seen Mary Oliver going in her latest poems—the Poem itself is embodied in this blessing: the typing/writing fingers, the mouth describer, the eyes which tell the truth, the feet (not for their moving!), and shoulders and spine for structuring the “whole story,” line and stanza. The Poem itself has a body! And all these bodies are imagined charged with that most sacred energy of Life—the energy of fire, of sensation, of sex, of art, of spirit, of truth, of “godly grip.” We are asked to notice that the body of the observer (the poet), the body of the observed (rose, lover, goose, bee, fox, dolphin), and the “body” of a poem become one.
A poem from the 1994 collection White Pine offers a vivid and moving example of this sublime alignment of bodies. As you listen to this last poem, see how the poet becomes the fox becomes the poem, fluidly, compassionately, poignantly, hopefully.
I Found a Dead Fox
I found a dead fox
beside the gravel road,
curled inside the big
iron wheel
of an old tractor
that has been standing,
for years,
in the vines at the edge
of the road.
I don't know
what happened to it--
when it came there
or why it lay down
for good, settling
its narrow chin
on the rusted rim
of the iron wheel
to look out
over the fields,
and that way died--
but I know
this: its posture---
of looking,
to the last possible moment,
back into the world---
made me want
to sing something
joyous and tender
about foxes.
But what happened is this---
when I began,
when I crawled in
through the honeysuckle
and lay down,
curling my long spine
inside that cold wheel,
and touched the dead fox,
and looked out
into the wide fields,
the fox
vanished.
There was only myself
and the world,
and it was I
who was leaving.
And what could I sing
then?
Oh, beautiful world!
I just lay there
and looked at it.
And then it grew dark.
That day was done with.
And then the stars stepped forth
and held up their appointed fires---
those hot, hard
watchmen of the night.
I will close with
this poem’s cry, “Oh, beautiful world!” ringing. Of course Mary Oliver is an
environmentalist. She takes the most
direct possible route to conservation.
She preserves the world in a poem, but more importantly she preserves
the moments in which our bodies know that we are fundamentally one with that
which we would destroy. In the living
breathing words she preserves the feeling of union and compassion. Take this away with you into the day: the
poems you write have a genuine body. What?
You don’t write poetry? Oh, I
think you do. Look for their bodies in
your thoughts, in your words, in your dreams, in your art, in your garden, in
the clouds, in the stream behind your house, and come through them to know your
own body, its graces and its God. Mary
Oliver shows us how.
© Margaret H. Allen
April 13, 2003
[I could not be a poet without the natural world…. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, along the pale slopes of sand, I walk in ascendant relationship to rapture, and with words I celebrate this rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest.] In the act of writing the poem, I am obedient, and submissive. Insofar as one can, I put aside ego and vanity, and even intention. I listen. What I hear is almost a voice, almost a language. It is a second ocean, rising, singing into one’s ear, or deep inside the ears, whispering in the recesses where one is less oneself than a part of some single indivisible community.
Persons environmentally inclined have suggested that I am one of them. I don’t argue with them, but it’s not quite a fit. My work doesn’t document any of the sane and learned arguments for saving, healing, and protecting the earth for our existence. What I write begins and ends with the act of noticing and cherishing, and it neither begins nor ends with the human[ity]…. [T]he world makes a great distinction between kinds of life: human on the one hand, all else on the other hand. Or it throws everything into two categories: animate, and inanimate. Which are neither of them distinctions I care about…. What are divisions for, if you look into it, but to lay out a stratification—that is, to suggest where an appreciative or not so appreciative response is proper, to each of the many parts of our indivisible world?
When I came to a teachable age, I was, as most youngsters are, directed toward the acquisition of knowledge, meaning not so much ideas but demonstrated facts. Education as I knew it was made up of such a pre-established collection of certainties. Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the recognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state. I am not talking about having faith necessarily, although one hopes to. What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude. Such interest nourishes me beyond the finest compendium of facts. In my mind now, in any comparison of demonstrated truths and unproven but vivid intuitions, the truths lose.
I would therefore write a kind of elemental poetry that doesn’t just avoid indoors but doesn’t even see the doors that lead inward—to laboratories, to textbooks, to knowledge. I would not talk about the wind, and the oak tree, and the leaf on the oak tree, but on their behalf. I would talk about the owl and the thunderstorm and the daffodil and the red-spotted newt as a company of spirits as well as bodies. I would say that the fox stepping out over the snow has nerves as fine as mine, and a better courage. I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.
I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links
between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and out chances
are one. The farthest star and the mud
at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one
thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the
—Mary Oliver, “Winter Hours,” in Winter Hours (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) pp. 98-102
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