Month: February 2004

Reading Mary Oliver’s later poems is somewhat of a rollercoaster ride between total despair and sheer elation, always driven by an awareness of death. At it’s best, this awareness produces some excellent poems. One of my favorites, though I’m not quite sure why, is:

A BITTERNESS

I believe you did not have a happy life.
I believe you were cheated.
I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.
I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.
I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.
I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.
I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.
I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness.
I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and unassuaged.
Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillsides.

It’s easy to become bitter in this world, a world of often unattainable promises, a world of sorrow. No matter how justified the bitterness, though, bitterness cannot lead to happiness. If all you learn from life is bitterness, you will “lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and unassuaged.” Oliver suggests, at least in the last line, and in many of her poems, that the best way to escape such bitterness is to lose yourself in the “wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillsides.” The last line, at least for me, however, cannot dispell the darkness of this poem. It is the bitterness that drives the poem not the abandonment to nature. It is a “bitterness” that seems to lie at the edge of many of Oliver’s poems.

Perhaps it’s Oliver’s abilty to recognize the imperfection of life, to have experienced and acknowleged the hardships, and yet to transcend them in the end:

THE PONDS

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them-

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided-
and that one wears an orange blight-
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away-
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled-
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing-
that the light is everything-that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Although it’s foolish to deny reality when faced with it, I, too, seek to believe in that perfectibility. When faced with a clear-cut forest blanketed in snow, it would be easy to remember that it is a false beauty belied by the stumps and rubble that lie underneath the snow, but I prefer to see only the beauty of that moment. Individual events in our lives may have been demeaning and distasteful, but they do not diminish the beauty of life as a whole. Life is always greater than the sum of its parts.

I like a surprising number of Mary Oliver’s poems in these sections, but, as usual, the ones I particularly like are the ones that I identify with the most. In fact, “The Fish” made me remember some particularly vivid childhood memories that I’d manage to forget:

THE FISH

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
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 to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.

Now, the first fish I ever caught were salmon, large salmon at that, and I still remember that I couldn’t bring myself to hit the beautiful fish on the head with the small “bat” that my father brought for precisely that purpose. And I still remember feeling sorry for the fish flailing at the bottom of the boat desperately trying to get back in the water. Half tempted to throw it back, I was always relieved when my father would finally dispatch the salmon with a single blow.

I was particularly proud when mom announced we were eating Loren’s salmon, proud that at six or seven I could contribute to the family. Salmon were an essential part of our diet, and, living in the Northwest, I findi it difficult not to identify with the great salmon runs.

And, in a very real sense, the last three lines “Out of pain,/ and pain, and more pain/ we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished/ by the mystery” capture some of the mystery that we in the Northwest identify with the great salmon runs where the salmon complete the mystical cycle of life and death, literally sacrificing themselves to propagate the next generation, and we, mere humans, can only stand in awe.

I suspect that our recent snowstorm, the first in several years here in the Pacific Northwest flatlands, has something to do with my liking of “First Snow:”

FIRST SNOW

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain-not a single
answer has been found-
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

Though there is certainly something about the immediacy of this poem that appeals to me, part of the appeal also comes from recognizing the opposite truth, that such immediacy cannot truly answer the ultimate questions that haunt us. At best, it merely holds them in abeyance, as temporary as the snow that coats the landscape.