June 27: "Just Lying in the Grass at Blackwater," Dark Matter, Answers

Mary Oliver thinks about death . . . 

Just Lying in the Grass at Blackwater

by:  Mary Oliver

I think sometimes of the possible glamour of death--

that it might be wonderful to be

lost and happy inside the green grass--

or to be the green grass!--

or, maybe the pink rose, or the blue iris,

or the affable daisy, or the twirled vine

looping its way skyward--that it might be perfectly peaceful

to be the shining lake, or the hurrying, athletic river,

or the dark shoulders of the trees

where the thrush each evening weeps himself into an ecstasy.

I lie down in the fields of goldenrod, and everlasting.

Who could find me?

My thoughts simplify.  I have not done a thousand things

or a hundred things but, perhaps, a few.

As for wondering about answers that are not available except

in books, though all my childhood I was sent there

to find them, I have learned

to leave all that behind

as in summer I take off my shoes and my socks,

my jacket, my hat, and go on

happier, through the fields.  The little sparrow

with the pink beak

calls out, over and over, so simply--not to me

but to the whole world.  All afternoon

I grow wiser, listening to him, 

soft, small, nameless fellow at the top of some weed,

enjoying his life.  If you can sing, do it.  If not,

even silence can feel, to the world, like ahppiness,

like praise,

from the pool of shade you have found beneath the everlasting.

I know what y'all are thinking:  here he goes, writing his depressing shit again.

That's a fair apprehension.  I mean, I have a penchant for gravitating toward dark matter.  That's what interests me, sometimes to the point of distraction.  Each ache in my knee or throb in my head, an indication of a fatal condition.  In my defense, I have been an insulin-dependent diabetic since I was 13-years-old, so I've probably had more than my share of encounters with near death.  I could give Emily Dickinson a good run for her money.  Death has kindly stopped for me on many occasions.

But I don't find Mary Oliver's depiction of eternal darkness all that dark.  It is, in fact, full of, as she says, glamour.  Green grass.  Pink roses.  Affable daisies.  Athletic rivers.  A little sparrow with a pink beak, calling and singing.  Dare I say that Oliver's death is full of life?  It really is.

Death is sort of the end of all the human groping for answers, according to Oliver.  Because you become part of the grass and lake and blue iris, the questions don't matter so much anymore.  In fact, they don't matter at all.  When the struggle of heart and lungs and brain ceases, we pretty much find out the answers to the questions that have plagued humankind since we crawled out of the primordial gravy so long ago.  The soul.  God.  Jimmy Hoffa.  Amelia Earhart.  Bigfoot.  We will either know it all, or it just won't matter anymore.  (I'm really holding out hope for Bigfoot.)

Remember those moments when we were kids and did things like purposely stomp through mud puddles or lie on our backs and stare up at the clouds, trying to make them into penguins or dolphins or goldfish?  Those were really good days.  Simple as peanut butter sandwiches.  Filled with wonder.

I hope that's what death is like.  Fingers of grass.  Blue, blue sky.  And clouds that look like Falkor the Luck Dragon.

Saint Marty hopes that's his neverending story.