A Meeting
by: Mary Oliver
She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.
The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.
She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion
and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.
So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.
In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers
I meet them.
I can only stare.
She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.
Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me
like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,
to be utterly
wild.
Ecclesiastes 3 is one of my favorite Biblical passages:
I have to believe that Mary Oliver was well-acquainted with these verses. Tonight's poem is all about a time to be born--the beautiful doe bringing a secret slippery package into the green world. Her child soon leaps in pink and yellow flowers, and the new mother walks with her under the dream of the trees. Seeing them, Oliver wants to be reborn as something untamed and untamable.
Of course, if there is a season of birth, there's also a season of death. On this Friday the 13th, poet Louise Glück died. I've always thought of Glück as a poetic cousin to Mary Oliver, both women writing in plain, spare language about nature and love and loss and joy and grief. Glück was 80-years-old and had won just about every award a writer can win, including the Nobel Prize in Literature three years ago in the middle of the pandemic.
Tonight, as I sit in a hotel room in Calumet, Michigan, typing this post, I am still a little shocked by the news of Glück's passing. People die every day. I know this. It's a 100% certainty--we are all going to stop breathing eventually and become fertilizer or dust or compost. There are some people, however, who seem as ageless as Betty White. You just expect them to live forever. Mary Oliver was one of those people for me, and so was Louise Glück. (Let's not even go near the fact that she only lived for three years after receiving the Nobel--that kind of sucks.)
But it seems appropriate that Glück took her final bow in October--autumn in the United States--when the maples blaze and morning air bites the throat with coming frost. It is a perfect time to bid farewell. That doesn't make the farewell any easier, but a poet knows when to end a poem--what image or word to leave in the mind or on the tongue. And Glück was a hell of a poet.
So, I raise Louise Glück up to all of my faithful disciples this evening. She made the universe better, more beautiful with her words.
Saint Marty hopes someone says the same thing about him one day.
A poem by Glück:
Vespers
by: Louise Glück
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.
