September 9: "Spring," Wordlessness, Searching for Meaning

Mary Oliver reflects on the bear in all of us . . .

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.  

September 5: "October," Lines of Poetry, U. P. Hot

Mary Oliver is not in the world . . .

October

by:  Mary Oliver

1.

There's this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.

A longing wells up in its throat

like a blossom

as it breathes slowly.

What does the world

mean to you if you can't trust it

to go on shining when you're

not there?  And there's 

a tree, long-fallen; once

the bees flew to it, like a procession

of messengers, and filled it

with honey.

2.

I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the

     green pine tree:

little dazzler,

little song,

little mouthful.

3.

The shape climbs up out of the curled grass.  It

grunts into view.  There is no measure

for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes--

there is no telling

the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns

and yawns.

                    Near the fallen tree

something--a leaf snapped loose

from the branch and fluttering down--tries to pull me

into its trap of attention.

4.

It pulls me

into its trap of attention.

And when I turn again, the bear is gone.

5.

Look, hasn't my body already felt

like the body of a flower?

6. 

Look, I want to love this world

as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get

to be alive

and know it.

7.

Sometimes in late summer I won't touch anything, not

the flowers, not the blackberries

brimming in the thickets; I won't drink

from the pond; I won't name the birds or the trees;

I won't whisper my own name.

                              One morning

the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,

and didn't see me--and I thought:

so this is the world.

I'm not in it.

It is beautiful.

There are some lines of poetry that simply stick with me.  Usually, they are lines that express some truth so clearly and profoundly that the words seem necessary and holy.  In Oliver's poem for today, she writes:

Look, I want to love this world

as though it's the last chance I'm going to get

to be alive 

and know it.

Simple words, but think about what Oliver is saying.  Every day needs to be lived as though we know we will never see another sunrise or sunset.  So much of modern life is rushing from one experience to another, without taking the time to slow down enough to say "amen" or "thank you" or even "holy shit!"

The last six or seven days in my little portion of the Upper Peninsula have been pretty hot.  Of course, "hot" is a relative term.  There's U. P. hot, and then there's Texas hot.  U. P. hot leads people to the shores of Lake Superior where they do crazy things like jump off cliffs into the glacial waters.  U. P. hot slows us down enough that we really notice the world around us--the orange globe of moon, green haze of auroras, honey flicker of wind in the maples and pines.

But we aren't really a part of this show, as Oliver says.  We're just observers.  Audience members who watch the bear lumber out of the tall grass, see the fox descend from the hills with glittering confidence.  And we feel ourselves blossoming open in the hothouse of all this abundant beauty.

Tonight, rain rolls in.  I will wake to the sound of it on the roof, like hundreds of knuckles cracking above me.  As I lie in bed, I will think to myself:  so this is the world, and I'm not in it.

And it's beautiful.

And Saint Marty will just listen and listen and listen and feel himself breaking open like a thirsty seed.