Softest of Mornings
by: Mary Oliver
Softest of mornings, hello.
And what will you do today, I wonder,
to my heart?
And how much honey can the heart stand, I wonder,
before it must break?
This is trivial, or nothing: a snail
climbing a trellis of leaves
and the blue trumpets of its flowers.
No doubt clocks are ticking loudly
all over the world.
I don't hear them. The snail's pale horns
extend and wave this way and that
as her finger-body shuffles forward, leaving behind
the silvery path of her slime.
Oh, softest of mornings, how shall I break this?
How shall I move away from the snail, and the flowers?
How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?
Even the softest of mornings, filled with honey and the slow crawl of a snail, can break your heart. In fact, it is the softest of mornings that can break your heart the most.
Today would have been my sister Sally's 62nd birthday. I woke up on this softest of mornings knowing that, thinking that, feeling that. She's been gone for eight years now, but I still have this gaping space in my introspective and ambitious life. She was glue, and she was foundation. In every sense of the word, she held our family together. Christmases happened because of her. Birthdays and Thanksgivings and Halloweens. She was Santa Claus AND the Great Pumpkin AND the Easter Bunny.
I could spend hours talking about her generosity of spirit. If I ever ran into financial problems because of emergency car or home repairs, she would transfer money into my account without even telling me. No strings attached. No questions asked. If my kids wanted something extra special for their birthdays or Christmas (or any other day of the year), she would get it for them because their joy was her joy. If I was struggling with a major life decision, she would sit me down, listen to me, and then offer me advice, without any pressure to follow that advice.
But I'm not going to talk about any of that. I want to talk about a softest of mornings moment with Sally.
Sally and I worked together at an outpatient surgery center for close to 15 years. She was the director, and I was the business office person. This arrangement may not have worked all that well with other siblings, but she and I understood each other. Kept it professional when we were on the job.
On Saturday mornings, Sally and my family used to meet up at McDonald's for breakfast. We would pile into the playroom, and she would buy my kids pancakes and chocolate milk and Diet Coke. If we stayed long enough for the breakfast menu to change over to lunch, she would buy them chicken nuggets and fries. While the kids crawled through the play structure, we would sit at a table and do crossword puzzles together. (She would save the daily crosswords from the newspaper all week, so we usually had a pile of them to complete.)
That was our Saturday mornings, and sometimes a little of our Saturday afternoons, as well. Nothing earthquaking happened. We talked a lot. Laughed a lot. Sometimes ate a lot. And it was like watching a snail crawl up the trumpet of a blue flower. Gorgeously slow and beautiful. A deep breath after a week of stress and hard, hard work. We didn't talk about office stuff. We just enjoyed the honey of each other's company and love.
I think back on those softest of mornings now. They weren't monumental. No, they were so ordinary that they blend together in my mind. I thought that I would always have those Saturday mornings with her, just like I thought Sally would be around when my daughter graduated from high school, when my son got his driver's license.
It didn't work out that way.
I have moved past from those snail Saturdays with Sally, when it seemed like we had all the time in the world to be together.
Yes, on the softest of mornings, time does stand still, even though the planet is still spinning on its axis at one thousand miles per hour and our lives with it. That's the way the universe works.
But Saint Marty would give anything to do one more crossword puzzle with you, Sally. Happy birthday.
Strawberry Picking
by: Martin Achatz
You took me strawberry picking
once, drove out to a farm
where we paid to squat in green
beds laced with tongues of red.
I could feel my ears and neck
tighten under the punishing
sun as we filled Morning Glory
ice cream buckets with our
harvest, each berry looking to me
like some vital body part,
an organ or muscle necessary
for life. You sat on your haunches,
fingers staining red, as if you
were some battlefield surgeon
patching up the fallen with only
your hands. Every now and then,
you would lift a berry to your lips,
eat it in a hummingbird moment,
smiling the smile of the freshly
healed at Lourdes, where miracles
are common as empty wheelchairs
or dandelions in a July field.
The days since you’ve been gone,
I see strawberries everywhere,
in a welt of blood on my lip
after shaving, a stop sign,
a friend’s dyed hair,
my son’s sunburned shoulders,
oxygen in the gills of a perch.
Last night, I stood outside, under
ribbons of borealis, watched
them glide between the stars
like garter snakes in a midnight
Eden. The Bible says that, in the cool
of the day, Adam and Eve heard
God taking a stroll through
the garden. There were probably
peacocks nesting in the pines,
a stream talking with moss and stone,
the scurry of mole and spider
in the ferns.
That’s what I believe you heard
in your last moments of breath.
You heard peafowl screams,
brook trout leaps. Grasshopper wing
and corn silk. And you heard
his divine toes in the grass, walking
along. When he came to you,
he couldn’t resist. He reached down,
plucked you from the stem. You were
ripe. Sweet. Ready. He put you
in his Morning Glory bucket, continued
on into the dew and sunlight.
