September 21: "Five A.M. in the Pinewoods," Right Place, Close Encounter

Mary Oliver has a close encounter . . . 

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods

by:  Mary Oliver

I'd seen

their hoofprints in the deep

needles and knew

they ended the long night

under the pines, walking

like two mute

and beautiful women toward

the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and

went there.  They came

slowly down the hill

and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly

they stepped

closer and stared

from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp

tassels of weeds.  This

is not a poem about a dream,

though it could be.

This is a poem about the world

that is ours, or could be.

Finally

one of them--I swear it!--

would have come to my arms.

But the other

stamped sharp hoof in the

pine needles like

the tap of sanity,

and they went off together through

the trees.  When I woke

I was alone,

I was thinking:

so this is how you swim inward,

so this is how you flow outward,

so this is how you pray.

I don't know how Mary Oliver does it.  

I've been reading and writing about her for over nine months now.  Each night, I sit down with one of her poems, and I find myself stunned into wordlessness by Oliver's lines.  Her poems are like the deer in the pinewoods--shyly emerging from the trees in all their mute beauty.  You stand immobile, or they'll startle and disappear.

My job as a reader is simply to be in the right place at the right time and take it in.  Let the poems approach, look at me from under their thick eyelashes, and stamp their hoofs to warn or frighten.  Of course, poems, like deer, are skittish and unpredictable.  They flee at the threat of human presence.  

This is a close encounter of the poem kind.

I struggled to find my Mary Moment all day long, from my 8:30 a.m. meeting to my 7 p.m. virtual poetry open mic.  I told myself I didn't have time to search for any kind of miracle.  I just worked and worked and worked.  When I got home from the library, I worked on my laptop for a couple more hours.  And then I did it.  I went hunting for a miracle.  

It didn't take long.  I found a bank of beautiful clouds piled up in the sky, deep blue and white.  Now, I know that clouds aren't living things.  But, as a kid, I would transform them into dragons and elephants and blue whales.  These celestial creatures never startled or ran away from me.  They hung above, watching, guarding.

But clouds, like deer or poetry, are momentary miracles.  They appear, inspire, and vanish, leaving behind only memory and breath.  Clouds are carried away by winds.  Deer are startled away by noises.  And poems are given life by voice and breath, briefly, before disappearing like the aurora borealis. 

Deer watching.  Cloud watching.  Poem watching.  They're really all the same thing:  being open to everyday miracles.

This Saint Marty believes.