Ghosts
by: Mary Oliver
1.
Have you noticed?
2.
Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts
lay down on the earth and died
it's hard to tell now
what's bone, and what merely
was once.
The golden eagle, for instance,
has a bit of heaviness in him;
moreover the huge barns
seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off
toward deeper grass.
3.
1805
near the Bitterroot Mountains:
a man named Lewis kneels down
on the prairie watching
a sparrow's nest cleverly concealed in the wild hyssop
and lined with buffalo hair. The chicks,
not more than a day hatched, lean
quietly into the thick wool as if
content, after all,
to have left the perfect world and fallen,
helpless and blind
into the flowered fields and the perils
of this one.
4.
In the book of the earth it is written:
nothing can die.
In the book of the Sioux it is written:
they have gone away into the earth to hide.
Nothing will coax them out again
but the people dancing.
5.
Said the old-timers:
the tongue
is the sweetest meat.
Passengers shooting from train windows
could hardly miss, they were
that many.
Afterward the carcasses
stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned
with slopes of white fat,
black ropes of blood--hellhunks
in the prairie heat.
6.
Have you noticed? how the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins. Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell in the earth as the herd stood
day after day, moon after moon
in their tribal circle, outwaiting
the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also
have you noticed? gone now.
7.
Once only, and then in a dream,
I watched while, secretly
and with the tenderness of any caring woman,
a cow gave birth
to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him
in a warm corner
of the clear night
in the fragrant grass
in the wild domains
of the prairie spring, and I asked them,
in my dream I knelt down and asked them
to make room for me.
A wise person once said that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I think Mary Oliver had that piece of wisdom in mind when she wrote this poem, which is full of the bones of millions of powerful bawling beasts, singing with flies and ribboned with white fat and black ropes of blood. Each line, each word is full of great hulking memories.
Every person who makes it to adulthood harbors memories that possess them at times. Choices they made. Loved ones they've lost. Places rattling with the chains of the past. We all accumulate ghosts as we march through our days.
Today, for me, the ghosts have been very, very near. Temperatures have fallen nearly 50 degrees over the past three days, and I woke to bone-chilling winds. There was sun and blue sky and iron clouds and bullets of rain and, just down the street, a rainbow arcing over the roofs and trees.
Basically, it was a typical October morning in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
I did a poetry reading with several poet friends at my hometown library this afternoon. My wife took our car to work, so I walked to the reading. That is where ghosts started appearing.
You see, as a youngster, I used to spend hours and hours at this library, working my way through biographies of famous writers, reading e. e. cummings and Heart's Needle, and devouring all the mythology and paranormal and horror I could get my hands on. I knew those bookshelves the way I knew which houses in my neighborhood gave out full-size candy bars on Halloween.
So each time I step foot inside that building, I bump into ghosts of myself and my literary friends. Shades of Holden Caulfield and Santiago, Bigfoot and Martians. My mother never questioned my reading selections, even when I returned home with William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist tucked under my arm. I read anything and everything, frequently staying up all night to do so.
This evening, as I sit writing this post, I'm still surrounded by today's ghosts. living and dead, literary and real. Ahab and Zaphod Beeblebrox. Earlier incarnations of myself and parents and brothers and sisters. They all swirl around me like tendrils of fog.
One of my favorite books as a kid was The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. I found comfort in a narrative that had a life of its own, that continued even after you stopped reading. Maybe that's what we all are--ghosts in a story that never reaches "The End" or "and they lived happily ever after."
Maybe Saint Marty is the ghost of that little boy, sitting on the living room couch with his stack of library books, waiting for the next chapter to unfold in his own neverending story.
