Picking Blueberries,
Austerlitz, New York, 1957
by: Mary Oliver
Once, in summer,
in the blueberries,
I fell asleep, and woke
when a deer stumbled against me.
I guess
she was so busy with her own happiness
she had grown careless
and was just wandering along
listening
to the wind as she leaned down
to lip up the sweetness.
So, there we were
with nothing between us
but a few leaves, and the wind's
glossy voice
shouting instructions.
The deer
backed away finally
and flung up her white tail
and went floating off toward the trees--
but the moment before she did that
was so wide and so deep
it has lasted to this day;
I have only to think of her--
the flower of her amazement
and the stalled breath of her curiosity,
and even the damp touch of her solicitude
before she took flight--
to be absent again from this world
and alive, again, in another,
for thirty years
sleepy and amazed,
rising out of the rough weeds,
listening and looking.
Beautiful girl,
where are you?
There is so much innocence and beauty in this poem. Oliver, asleep in a patch of blueberries, and the doe, drunk on sweetness, stumbling into her. Neither afraid of the other. Both reveling in this moment of solicitude and connection. Fellow lovers of the color blue.
It has been another early September scorcher. Labor Day in the United States. Ninety-five degrees outside, and the smell of barbecuing hotdogs thick in the air. These lazy last days of warmth and sun always make me nostalgic for a childhood that I don't really remember.
When I was a baby and toddler, my family used to spend two weeks every summer vacationing in a hunting camp near the shores of Lake Superior in Gay, Michigan. Off the grid. No phone. No electricity. An outhouse down the path from the camp, just after the sauna. And the constant saw of cicada, all day, every day.
I was the youngest of nine kids and was frequently under the charge of older brothers and sisters. Translation: I was the pain in the ass little brother. My mother would kick us out of the cabin early morning, and we would disappear into the woods and beach. Sometimes, she would send us with buckets.
Those buckets were for us to collect blueberries, which grew in abundance around the camp. I'm not talking the chemically-fattened blueberries you can pick up at Walmart. I'm talking blueberries sugared by sun and sand and insect. Each one, a burst of summer on the tongue.
Again, I have no real memories of these vacations. I only have stories, told by my parents, repeated by my siblings. But my sister sent me a picture tonight. Me, tow-headed, deep in a field of bushes with my other sisters and mother. We're all looking at the camera, almost in annoyance, as if we don't want to be distracted from the sweet, blue enterprise before us.
At least, I want to believe we're picking blueberries, our mother waiting back at camp for us to return with our harvest. Maybe to make pancakes or muffins or jam.
We're all so young. So alive. So innocent.
Saint Marty can almost taste the sand and sun in his mouth.
Sweet children, where are you now?
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