Captured in a bright window, a husband and wife ready themselves to fly. She curls her hair while speaking. He shaves under his chin, speaking. Their bags stacked in the foyer, a taxicab idles out front, its taillights shining red, its exhaust pipe puttering. Beyond the house, silhouetted conifers mark a jagged line rising and falling as if through the sheen of stars, while a speck of light, a satellite crosses the sky on a northward trajectory. Gazes widen and narrow before each, their own reflection.
A conversation that started as a lament over the ethics of air travel in a time of changing weather patterns has morphed into a debate over the tragedy at North Sentinel Island. The tribes-people there, a culture reaching back 30,000 years, thrashed an American proselytizer as he came ashore to convince them of their savior. They hanged him in the tropical air as a warning sign to future trespassers. Shot him full of arrows. One wonders, Can we expect to go where we want without impunity? “Absolutely we can,” she says. “Absolutely not,” he counters. “Are you kidding me?”
Captured there in the bright terminal of the municipal airport, the husband and wife listen to the recorded voice of an English speaker issuing a warning: “Any unattended bags will be removed by the authorities and destroyed.” “Do they really destroy them?” she asks. “Or do they just say they will and store them somewhere as a kind of object lesson?” “How should I know?” he says. “Do I look like a screener?” “When I was a little girl,” she says, “my parents never followed through with their punishments. Isn’t that funny?” “I got spanked with wooden spoon,” he says, “and it hurt like a mother.” “If they swore a spanking,” she says, “no one laid a finger on me. If it was restriction, I gained my freedom through extra sweetness. If it was a month without television, I played dumb, and we all watched something together later that evening.” “I assume they detonate them,” he says. “Blow them to smithereens.” “It doesn’t pertain to us though,” she says. “How could it?”
The husband and wife are not lawbreakers, and they are not terrorists. Neither of them knows from childhood a vengeful god or religion. Neither harbors a guilty conscious. If they’re not watchers to their core, the proverbial Eyes of the World, they are fine having been made more vigilant by a recorded voice, an urgent message said over and over again on their way to the Shrine of Guadalupe, the Teotihuacan Pyramids.
Here are a few excerpts from a long essay I’m working on about Mary Oliver and Plato (odd bedfellows, I know). Though I am not always a fan of Mary Oliver’s poetry, I am moved by both her tenacity as a poet and the positive impact her writing continues to have on the lives of so many poetry lovers.
They say if Mary is taking a walk, and she begins to walk slower and slower, and finally she’s standing still scribbling, you know it was a successful walk. —Mary Oliver talking about herself as a poet writing in nature[1]
1.
The twins Liney and Jane and especially Liney love the nature poetry of Mary Oliver. I prefer Hass. Something so simple as his “…small brown wren in the tangle/of the climbing rose…” stirs my imagination more than anything from Oliver.[2] They especially admire her poem “Wild Geese.”[3] They call it a permission poem when the poet invites the reader not to be so hard on herself:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
The poem then conflates reading with wandering across what to my mind is an alluvial plain. Then Liney might ask, ‘What’s to see, Theo, in landscapes running together like this?’ ‘What’s it feel like to go out into them?’ Whatever ‘it’ is, I look through mist and weeds. Through colorless, odorless weather:
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.
It’s like a mystical experience when, reading the poem, Liney claims to cease to exist. Or she coexists with those oral geese flapping high overhead in some slack V formation and enough rising light to eat a moon with!
2.
Mary Oliver’s hometown of Maple Heights, Ohio, covers roughly five square miles of suburban Cleveland, where the twins were born and raised. A handsewn notebook Mary Oliver carried for jotting down her experiences in the woods of Cuyahoga County measures 3-by-5 inches and contains owls, an alder grove, graveyards, bright barns, mothers, fathers, blueberry fields, mortgages, cranberry bogs, a bear, robins, Shawnee in absentia, rainy seasons, egrets, lightning, a few kids running at dusk, first snow, mushrooms, lumbermen, quick Ohio creeks, a train whistle, passing neighbors, strangers passing, a buck moon, hunters moon, wolf moon, sickle moon, strawberry moon, walnut trees, beech, sugar maple, cucumber trees, everything waiting to be reassembled into proper poems.
3.
I don’t see Mary Oliver as a permission poet the way the twins do. She is a peripatetic poet, maybe, going around on foot to gather her materials and vibes. Going into the woods like that. She identifies herself as this other kind, too:
I’ve written before that God has ‘so many names.’ To me, it’s all right if you look at a tree, as the Hindus do, and say the tree has a spirit. It’s a mystery, and mysteries don’t compromise themselves—we’re never gonna know. I think about the spiritual a great deal. I like to think of myself as a praise poet. I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.[4]
Permission. Peripatetic. Praise. I could do something with these words. I just might. An informal dissertation. I almost got a Master’s degree. It was to be in Poetics. I would have borrowed fifty thousand dollars to cover tuition. Who goes fifty thousand dollars into debt for a hobby that may or may not be his passion?
4.
Of the fifteen books of poems Mary Oliver wrote, the one before Dream Work that got her the Pulitzer. She was already being touted as the bestselling poet in modern times. My chalking her popularity up to the accessibility of her poems led the twins to think of me as an elitist for a while. I admitted without sarcasm that she could be soulful: In our time of climate change, her poems asked what was missing and, naming Nature, may yet turn us into mystics.
But it wasn’t always about Nature. I suspect that the twins rank Dream Work over the other books because suddenly, and then only occasionally, the poet steps out of those nearby woods to write in conspicuous ways about her own suffering. The poem “Rage” is about a man, presumably her father, interfering with her when she was a child. Of him she writes
But you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child’s bed,
to the damp rose of her body,
leaving your bitter taste. The damp rose of her body stays with me, even if I expect a darker presentation of abuse. I want to talk to the twins and especially Liney about this. What is the redness of song? Where may rage go? But I cannot for the simple reason that I don’t know what Liney has lived through and what attracts here to these poems.
5.
Mary Oliver lived in three different and distinct places representing three essential phases of her life. We started in the woods near Maple Heights with her pencils and handsewn notebook that she might set aside while she whistled or whittled or spotted animals or diverted streams with rocks peeled from the moist earth or assembled what to her mind was a thatched house for a wayward girl leaving her real home forever. I imagine this to be her entire adolescence, before she went away to Ohio State University without taking a degree and then to Vassar, again without taking a degree. I love any detail implying underachievement and also a higher calling. Then it was off to Provincetown in what I’m calling Mary Oliver’s middle phase. She lived with Molly Cook, a photographer, I believe, and a gallery owner, for decades. She must have written the bulk of her poems there. Whether she did or not, the women descended together into retirement in Florida, where Mary outlived Molly. Then a protracted mourning period before Mary could have some fun on her own. Despite her introversion, she mingled with a big and I think multigenerational band of friends, before contracting cancer and dying at eighty-three on the island of Hobe Sound.
[1] From an interview Mary Oliver gave Maria Shriver for Oprah Winfrey’s website (2011)
[2] From Robert Hass’ poem “Cuttings” in Human Wishes (1989)
[3] Originally published in her book Dream Work (1986)
[4] From an interview Mary Oliver gave Maria Shriver for Oprah Winfrey’s website (2011)
The day after the assassination, Ms. House brought her own television set to school. Arranging its large rabbit ears until the picture came in clearly, she showed everyone the soldiers transporting the President to Arlington. They carried his corpse in a horse-drawn wagon. The horses, snowy white, were mythical looking. A flag was draped over the coffin. People in mourning lined the avenues for miles. The dead president lay in state in the rotunda. The First Lady shrouded in black, her little boy wore shorts in winter.
Aesop. A heron walking beside a stream watches over food like a brood. A hunter of her own breakfast, she’s childless. Her neck long, eyes made cruel for stalking, she draws her head back and her bill, cocked like a clapping javelin. Streams swarm with ignorant swimmers. Crossing into their lines of sight, she is refracted there, quavering, towering, odd, dreamlike, when a small body passes through her shadow. “I wouldn’t eat you if you were the last perch on earth,” she says. “You’re too puny a morsel.” Seeing no fish whatsoever in the blinding sun, Great Fisher settles on a snail diet. Do not be too hard to please if you don’t want a mollusk for your rations.
Note to Self. The blue herons came back to Magee Marsh on the south shore of Lake Erie a week earlier than expected. They arrived at the Bath Road heronry, between Akron Peninsula and River roads, around the middle of February. They usually nest in secluded spots. The way we crowd the Earth, one wonders what all we’re getting them used to.
