For my brother Loren (1947-2010)
It's the time of the Coronavirus pandemic and America is under seige. Millions of us are isolating, taking extreme measures to avoid getting or giving the virus to others, to slow down the spread, flatten the curve. It's how it must have been when our parents and grandparents suffered through the Great Depression and World War II. It's scary. Life seems precarious. A dangerous world calls on us to dig deep, to call on inner resources. I take joy from little things, like my 8-year-old grandson Chase and high school senior Kyle, who live directly across the street, holding up "I MISS YOU" signs and neat drawings that I can see from my front porch. Their nurse mom, my daughter Michelle, on the frontlines of this virus, is keeping them busy. My daughter Elissa, a graphic designer working from home, is making sure her grandson Philip, my 12-year-old great-grandson, is occupied. I'm taking time to go through stacks of unread magazines and books that have piled up over the months. I'm writing. I turn for comfort to the poetry of Mary Oliver, whom I discovered while serving with the Peace Corps in Ukraine, a gift from my cousins Leo and Kathy upon the death of my brother Loren. Beautifully, painfully appropriate.
My grandchildren, bless their hearts, do not think it's a good idea for us elderly grandparents to sacrifice ourselves to save the economy, which is taking a catastrophic hit. Business has stopped, the stock market's going crazy. The alarmingly inept corrupt politicians running the country into the ground, who ignored intel about the novel coronavirus for months before being forced to deal with it, are making a bad situation worse. Who believes a liar incapable of compassion? But then, shocking as it is, they really don't give a damn about the public's health either, only about the stock market. My grandkids see right through them.Okay. Enough of that. Time to check into Mary Oliver. Time to find comfort in her life and words. I had forgotten that she was born in Ohio, in a small town outside of Cleveland, and that's where she first discovered the transcendent beauty and closeness of the natural world. I understand it, living in Ohio now, being with my family, loving the state's natural beauty, its indigenous plants and wildflowers loved by the honeybees.
"It was pastoral...it was an extended family. I don't know why I felt such an affinity with the natural world except that it was available to me...It was right there. And for whatever reasons, I felt those first important connections, those first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with the social world."
Those experiences, those connections with nature, stayed with Oliver forever. She started writing poetry when she was 14 years old, and she never stopped.
In her twenties, she moved to New England, and then to Provincetown, where she lived with her lifelong partner Molly Malone Cook, a photographer and her literary agent. It's here Oliver blossomed into our 21st-century Thoreau. Our Emerson and Walt Whitman. Our Edna St Vincent Millay and yes, our Rumi. It is here she immersed herself in nature and delved into her life's work: "To pay attention, be in awe, and tell about it."A prolific writer, with over 20 volumes of poetry and writings to her name, she won a Pulitzer, a National Book award, and many other awards and accolades. Her accessible and nature-based poetry spoke to the hearts of readers and made her one of the most popular poets of her time. Not all critics were enamoured, but Molly loved her for it, and so did we, her readers. It was who she was.
Oliver wrote several poems about death after Molly died at 80 years of age in 2005. I read most of them after my beloved brother died. I read them for solace, and because for Loren, as for Oliver, being in nature was inseparable from living a full life.
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| Loren hiking. |
Loren died suddenly of a heart attack on a hike along the Aucilla River in northern Florida with the Florida Trails Association. I was serving with the Peace Corps in eastern Ukraine when the word came. I was devastated. His last hike. He had just finished his autobiography, An Asberger Journey. It came out a few months after he died, a "memorial" edition. His life, his struggles and achievements, his activism and passions, inspired lots of people, none more so than me, his older sister, and Andy our middle sister. It's been 10 years, and I still miss him. I will always miss him. In a poem Oliver wrote after Molly's death and read at her funeral, "The Soul at Last," she refers to death as "the Lord's terrifying kindness," which took me some time of grieving to understand.
"The Lord's terrifying kindness has come to me. It was only a small silvery thing--say a piece of silver cloth, or a thousand spider webs woven together,or a small handful of aspen leaves, with their silver backs shimmering. And it came leaping out of the closed coffin; it flew into the air, it danced snappingly around the church rafters, it vanished through the ceiling. I spoke there, briefly, of the loved one gone. I gazed at the people in the pews, some of them weeping. I knew I must, someday, write this down."
Oliver makes the natural world come alive in words, human, accessible, in that anthropomorphic way that gives life to the trees, the birds, the wild geese, the wild grasses. How I would have loved to join her on those long walks through the woods, on the dunes, along the seashore. To share her joy.
Oliver died in her Florida home in January 2019. She was ready. We could tell by her poetry. When death comes. White Flowers.
"Never in my life
had I felt so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and the stems and the flowers
began."
She had led a full and fulfilling life. She grasped what transcendentalist Margarat Fuller called "the fulness of being" in nature. She went into the woods, and she paid attention. She went into death the same way. Into the light, to discover, to be in awe. I imagine her hearing the eagles in chorus, the wild geese in flight, the goldenrod whispering goodbye. I imagine her hearing "the sound of the roses singing." I imagine her embracing it. White Flowers
Last night
in the fields
I lay down in the darkness
to think about death,
but instead I fell asleep,
as if in a vast and sloping room
filled with those white flowers
that open all summer,
sticky and untidy,
in the warm fields.
When I woke
the morning light was just slipping
in front of the stars,
and I was covered
with blossoms.
I don't know
how it happened—
I don't know
if my body went diving down
under the sugary vines
in some sleep-sharpened affinity
with the depths, or whether
that green energy
rose like a wave
and curled over me, claiming me
in its husky arms.
I pushed them away, but I didn't rise.
Never in my life had I felt so plush,
or so slippery,
or so resplendently empty.
Never in my life
had I felt so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and the stems and the flowers
began.
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How Would You Live Then?
What if a hundred rose-breasted grosbeaks
flew in circles around your head? What if
the mockingbird came into the house with you and
became your advisor? What if
the bees filled your walls with honey and all
you needed to do was ask them and they would fill
the bowl? What if the brook slid downhill just
past your bedroom window so you could listen
to its slow prayers as you fell asleep? What if
the stars began to shout their names, or to run
this way and that way above the clouds? What if
you painted a picture of a tree, and the leaves
began to rustle, and a bird cheerfully sang
from its painted branches? What if you suddenly saw
that the silver of water was brighter than the silver
of money? What if you finally saw
that the sunflowers, turning toward the sun all day
and every day – who knows how, but they do it – were
more precious, more meaningful than gold?
Mary Oliver ‘Blue Iris: Poems and Essays’ Penguin Random House, 2006
* Obituary, Patch, Miami, FL,Jan. 2019, by Paul Scicchitano: "Like her hero Walt Whitman, whom she would call the brother she never had, Oliver didn't only observe mushrooms growing in a rainstorm or an owl calling from a black branch; she longed to know and become one with what she saw. She might be awed by the singing of goldfinches or, as in the poem "White Flowers," overcome by a long nap in a field."___
"Never in my life
had I felt myself so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and the stems and the flowers
began . . . "
* https://www.npr.org/2019/01/17/577380646/beloved-poet-mary-oliver-who-believed-poetry-mustn-t-be-fancy-dies-at-83
