pantoum's Diaryland
Diary
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MARY OLIVER AND KEITH HARING IN A SINGLE ENTRY. A MERE COINCIDENCE? OR...
I love Mary Oliver's poetry, especially when I am locked indoors but aching to be outside (and yes, I know that she is a bit of a one-trick pony, as another poet once said to me). I also know I've already pasted a few of her poems here, but am staring longingly at my river rocks and wanting to go for a hike in the mountains, and so am adding a few more.
I hauled my river rocks back from the Pacific NW—man, were they heavy!—and try to look at them every day and pretend for at least a few minutes that the wind is blowing my hair as I walk on Whidbey Island or at some other remote location where the sand has elaborate, cartoonish ruts that Keith Haring might have scribbled all over the landscape.
So here are three more of my favorite Mary Oliver poems:
MORNING POEM
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches—
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead—
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging—
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
POPPIES
The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation
of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn't a place
in this world that doesn't
sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage
shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,
black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.
But also I say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,
touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—
and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?
IN BLACKWATER WOODS
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
9:42 a.m. - 2005-03-10
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