Toad
by: Mary Oliver
I was walking by. He was sitting there.
It was full morning, so the heat was heavy on his sand-colored head and his webbed feet. I squatted beside him, at the edge of the path. He didn't move,
I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time. The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night. About this cup we call a life. About happiness. And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.
He looked neither up nor down, which didn't necessarily mean he was either afraid or asleep. I felt his energy, stored under his tongue perhaps, and behind his bulging eyes.
I talked about how the world seems to me, five feet tall, the blue sky all around my head. I said, I wondered how it seemed to him, down there, intimate with the dust.
He might have been Buddha--did not move, blink, or frown, not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes as the refined anguish of language passed over him,
Oliver meets a toad as she's walking, and she does what Oliver always does: stops and pays attention. She talks to the toad about what is on her mind--food, summer, sun between her shoulder blades, the refined anguish of language. I love the adjective "refined" in this poem, because it hints at something that has been distilled, purified, broken down into its main elements. Oliver's words are a buffer between experience and understanding. She uses language to create meaning, but, of course, that language barely comes close to the truth.
That's what all poets do, really. We use the tools of poetry (imagery, rhythm, music, rhyme, metaphor, simile) to try to talk about how the world seems to us. To communicate our vision (version?) of reality. We TRY, but, most of the time, we fail. Because it's like trying to explain grief or love to a toad, who has not need for either of those emotions.
I spent this afternoon sitting in the middle of a bayou, giving away free poetry. It was part of an annual Bayou Art Walk sponsored by the Upper Peninsula Land Conservancy. As people passed by, I called to them like a carnival barker on the midway, tempting them with promises of a free postcard poem, plus and chance to roll the dice and win a poetry broadside poster. And people stopped. They read haiku and played the game.
I talked to strangers and friends, petted passing dogs, got individuals who probably hadn't touched poetry since high school to read a poem aloud to the cedars and ferns and birds. I didn't see any toads on the path, but I did spy a couple squirrels and a dragonfly or two.
This is my vision/version of reality today. Sun and wind and trees and poetry and art, all in one place. People going out of their ways, tramping along a path through a bayou, to find beauty and meaning. Me, sitting in the pines, sharing with a poet friend the refined anguish of language.
Saint Marty didn't have a Mary moment today. He had a Mary afternoon.
