August 20: "Toad," Bayou Art Walk, Vision of Reality

Mary Oliver has a conversation with a . . .

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. 

July 21: Poem from "Kyrie," Price We Pay, Grief

Poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

Once the world had had its fill of war,
in a secret wood, as the countryside lay stunned,
at the hour of the wolf and the vole, in a railroad car,
the generals met and put their weapons down.
Like spring it was, as word passed over all
the pocked and riven ground, and underground;
now the nations sat in a gilded hall,
dividing what they'd keep of what they'd won.

And so the armies could be done with war,
and soldiers trickled home to study peace.
But the old gardens grew a tough new weed,
and the old lives didn't fit as they had before,
and where there'd been the dream, a stranger's face,
and where there'd been the war, the empty sleeve.

-------------------------------------------

It's difficult trying to fit old lives into new experiences.  You can't go off to war and then return home without being irrevocably changed.  You can't live through a pandemic and accept a hug without flinching just a little after being deprived of human contact for so long.  You can't suffer the death of anything--a loved one, a marriage, a pet, a friendship--without becoming a little unwilling to open your heart up again.  Nine days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, in Saint Thomas Cathedral in Manhattan, a telegram from Queen Elizabeth II was read.  In it, she said, "Grief is the price we pay for love."

I find myself tonight at one of those junctures between love and grief.  Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, love can be snuffed out like a candle, and the resulting darkness settles on you like rain.  In that darkness, you start to build a wall around your heart.  Brick by brick.  Because you simply don't want to experience the pain of loss again.  It's the safe thing to do.  The human thing to do. 

It's raining tonight.  I can hear it tapping against my windows.  A deep, soaking rain.  Tomorrow morning, I'll wake to puddles, worms on the sidewalk, leaves studded with water.  And green everywhere. 

Because, no matter how high the wall, rain will come in the dark.  Something will grow.  To remind you of sunlight, and that you are loved.

And for that miracle, Marty, patron saint of bricks and mortar, gives thanks.