Backyard
by: Mary Oliver
I had no time to haul out
the dead stuff so it hung, limp
or dry, wherever the wind swung it
over or down or across. All summer
it stayed that way, untrimmed, and
thickened. The paths grew
damp and uncomfortable and mossy until
nobody could get through but a mouse or a
shadow. Blackberries, ferns, leaves, litter
totally without direction management
supervision. The birds loved it.
People who live in the city won't get this poem, unless they've spent time traveling and camping. And I'm not talking a couple days "roughing it" in rented cabins or tenting in Yosemite. I'm talking about at least three or four weeks where trees and birds are your closest neighbors. Where you wash up in a cold lake, and text messages are notes left in a spiral notebook. That's what Oliver is writing about here.
I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, just about 20 miles from the shores of Lake Superior. It's not unusual for deer to walk down my street at sunrise or sunset. Rabbits graze the tall grass of my backyard, and, in winter, the snow behind my house is mapped with animal tracks. Last spring and summer, there was a patch of fern on the side of my property that was flattened every morning. Something large and wild slept there every night. It could have been a bear, although I can't imagine any respectable black bear bedding down in the middle of a somewhat populated neighborhood, even in the middle of the U. P. Maybe it was Bigfoot setting up camp near a Bigfoot-friendly house. If you've been in the U. P. for even a little while, you will quickly understand why the idea of Bigfoot doesn't seem so outlandish.
I spent this afternoon and evening at my wife's family's camp. It's a rustic cabin on an inland lake down a dirt road. No electricity or internet. Just water and grass and wood smoke and a sauna. An occasional sandhill crane. We sweated, splashed around in the lake. I took a nap to a soundtrack of wind and waves and an occasional motorboat. When I woke, the aspect of light had changed. It was close to 6 p.m., and the sun had started its downward journey.
As I sit writing these lines in my journal, I know that soon we have to pack up and head back to our lives of electricity and streaming services and online grading. Just now, as I wrote the word "grading," a huge spider crawled across the page.
This right here, this deep breath moment, is what Oliver is writing about in this poem. It's about letting the wild be wild, leaving the world without direction, management, or supervision. A space only mice and shadows can penetrate, and birds sit and sun and sing. Where my human presence is Bigfoot, mysterious and terrifying, to everything untamed and untamable.
Saint Marty may howl at the moon a little tonight.
