Thinking of Mary Oliver

A GREAT POET AND A GREAT ROLE MODEL The death of Mary Oliver in Florida last week roused a number of  her readers to recall  her spirit and revisit their friendship. Mary Oliver was one of the few  contemporary  poets  who was read and  seen as a wisdom figure  by many people in our society.  I had the good fortune of making her acquaintance when she was the visiting Elliston poet and in residence for five weeks at the University of Cincinnati.  I  recall how inspiring her lectures and readings were and also how she went everywhere with her dog. She insisted on living in a rural area in Indiana and commuting to Ohio to teach. Mary Oliver had a consistent  view and lived  out her values and especially her close observations of  the natural world. She had a directness about her tone that made readers feel that she was not just speaking to them she was  speaking for them. Here is one of her poems about DEATH: When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measles-pox when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world
I have always loved a short poem of hers that talks about what is called DARSHAN in India--that moment when the veil of appearances trembles and we get a glimpse of the eternal reality that is behind all the illusions we see with our eyes of flesh:
“The Veil” There are moments when the veil seems almost to lift, and we understand what the earth is meant to mean to us — the trees in their docility, the hills in their patience, the flowers and the vines in their wild, sweet vitality. Then the Word is within us, and the Book is put away. I am going to add just one more poem to this little anthology. In this poem Mary Oliver urges us to stop  taking ourselves so seriously and stop making ourselves miserable: WILD GEESE You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.