Spring
by: Mary Oliver
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question;
how to love the world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her--
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
Oliver loves the world. Her poems are psalms to waves and birds and foxes and bears. To read a poem by her is like taking a walk in the forest, a drink from Blackwater Pond, a flight into a sky choked with blue. Oliver's love is filled with language and music and words.
Unlike the bear, whose love is wordless and dark and full of teeth.
As a poet, I depend on words. Words help me sort out the world and my place in it. When I'm confused or sad or joyful or angry, I assign words to what I'm feeling, create images and lines that put order into the chaos of life. That's the job of a poet--to search for meaning in meaninglessness, light in darkness, and darkness in light.
That bear, with her silent claws and red fire tongue and leafy ledge body, is the epitome of artless, ravenous, dark, wild love. A love that doesn't mediate the world with words or music. The bear wakes in the spring, hungry to taste the green glory all around her.
Human beings spend too much energy searching for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. According to Douglas Adams, the answer to that question is 42. According to Facebook, the answer is to post pictures of your dinner or children or significant other or a sunset to prove how blessed your life is. According to Mary Oliver, the answer is the dazzling darkness of the bear coming down from the mountain in spring amazement.
Every once in a while, I experience something that fills me like a puddle in a rainstorm. I'll feel the impulse to take out my phone to snap a photo to post on Facebook or Instagram. Or dig out my pen and journal to write a poem. Or go home and write a blog post about it. Instead of just standing there, letting myself drown in the moment.
This morning, after dropping my wife off at work, I drove to Lake Superior to watch the sunrise. It was a glorious, clear morning, and the sun climbed into the heavens like an orange turtle. Yes, I stopped. Yes, I took a picture. And, yes, when I got home, I jotted some lines down in my journal.
Mostly, however, Saint Marty allowed himself to be the bear, standing on the shore of the lake, lapping up the light with his thirsty ursine eyes after a long, dark winter's nap.
❤️
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