June 12: "Doesn't Every Poet Write a Poem About Unrequited Love?", One-Way Street, My Father

Mary Oliver on loving and being love . . . 

Doesn't Every Poet Write a Poem About Unrequited Love?

by:  Mary Oliver

The flowers

     I wanted to bring to you,

          wild and wet

               from the pale dunes

and still smelling

     of the summer night,

          and still holding a moment or two

               of the night cricket's

humble prayer,

     would have been 

          so handsome

               in your hands--

so happy--I dare say it--

     in your hands--

          yet your smile

               would have been nowhere

and maybe you would have tossed them

     onto the ground,

          or maybe, for tenderness,

               you would have taken them

into your house

     and given them water

          and put them in a dark corner

               out of reach.

In matters of love

     of this kind

          there are things we long to do

               but must not do.

I would not want to see

     your smile diminished.

          And the flowers, anyway,

               are happy just where they are,

on the pale dunes,

     above the cricket's humble nest,

          under the blue sky

               that loves us all.

I do think that every poet writes a poem about unrequited love.  In fact, I'd venture to say that every poem a poet writes is about love in some form.  I can't imagine spending any time writing a poem about a subject (whether it's a person, place, event, pet, chocolate candy, ice cream cone, or skunk) that I'm not in love with.  Poetry requires a certain amount of obsession and passion and (yes) love.

In my life, I've written poems about my kids and wife, my puppy, Bigfoot (many times), Darth Vader, fireflies, death, Lake Superior, and paintings by Picasso and Van Gogh.  That's an abridged list.  Every time I decide to write a poem, I fall in love with whatever my theme or subject is.  Sometimes, that love is mutual, and sometimes it's a one-way street.

Let me tell you about my dad, who was always a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy.

My father worked for 60-plus years as a plumbing contractor.  He loved his work the way I love writing poems.  Even after he retired, he still helped people out with leaky faucets and plugged toilets.  He just couldn't give it up completely.  Plumbing was his art.

I did not like plumbing.  Never liked plumbing.  When I was in middle and high school. my dad forced me to go on service calls with him or my brothers.  When my teachers made me write "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" essays, I would describe trenches filled with raw sewage and water heaters that spewed scalding liquid.  I didn't enjoy those summer days.

Yet, I know that my dad was trying to teach me skills that would help me support myself, just in case the writing thing didn't work out for me.  Basically, he was loving me the only way he knew how.  He wasn't a hugger, and I don't remember him ever saying to me, "I love you."

As a consequence of my dad's profession, I was always known as "the plumber's son" when I was growing up.  A new acquaintance would hear my last name and say, "Hey, are you related to the plumber?"  And I would have to fess up.

When I started graduate school, I was still known as the plumber's son.  Everyone knew my father.  He was an honest guy who would get up in the middle of a winter night to get a customer's furnace running without charging enough money to support the economy of a small, third-world country.  People loved my dad.

Me?  I didn't get my dad.  And I thought he didn't get me, either.  Yes, he came to plays and musicals I was in.  He sat through my high school graduation proudly.  He gave me a hunting rifle as a graduation present (because that was what he gave each of my brothers, too, when they graduated).  When I wrote stories or essays or poems, he read them.  Yet, me being a poet was a mystery to him, akin to me trying to replace a furnace filter or toilet ballcock.  

In short, I thought my relationship with my dad was a one-way street.  We didn't understand one another.  Plumber versus poet.  Conservative versus progressive.  Meat-and-potatoes versus shrimp-and-risotto.  I was so different from most of my siblings that, until I was eight or nine years old, my sister had me convinced that I was adopted.

One of the last times my father came to one of my poetry readings, he sat in the front row in the basement of a library.  He closed his eyes when I began and didn't open them again until I finished.  I thought he had fallen asleep.  He was well past 80, and his health was already in decline.  

After I was done, my father came up to me and said, "I closed my eyes so that I could listen to you more closely.  I wasn't asleep."  

I nodded, and then a woman approached and started talking to me about my poetry.  My father stood silently by, listening as I spoke with her.  After our brief exchange, I stepped away to speak to another attendee.  

The woman to whom I'd been speaking turned to my father and introduced herself to him, holding out her hand.

He shook her hand, and I heard him say to her, "I'm the poet's father."

That was the best gift Saint Marty ever received from his dad.