The Living Dead

 ~ Honouring our poetic ancestors ~

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods

I'd seen 
their hoofprints in the deep

needles and knew

they ended the long night

under the pines, walking

like two mute

and beautiful women toward

the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and

went there. They came

slowly down the hill

and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly

they stepped

closer and stared

from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp

tassels of weeds. This

is not a poem about a dream,

though it could be.

This is a poem about the world

that is ours, or could be.

Finally

one of them—I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.

But the other

stamped sharp hoof in the

pine needles like

the tap of sanity,

and they went off together through

the trees. When I woke

I was alone,

I was thinking:

so this is how you swim inward,

so this is how you flow outward,

so this is how you pray.

– Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
from House of Light (Boston, Beacon Press, 1990)

This is my personal favourite Mary Oliver poem – though they are all wonderful and I love every poem of hers I've ever seen or heard. I first discovered her work when I found House of Light in my (then) local library many years ago, probably around 1993. I contemplated stealing the book! As a former librarian, and someone brought up to consider books sacred, you may understand what a huge departure it was for me even to think of such a thing, and how powerful the cause.

I didn't give in to such a nefarious impulse, but always meant to buy the book. I couldn't find it in Australia at that time; shops probably didn't keep it very long after the publication date. Only after she died I finally bethought myself to look on Amazon, and now have it at last, in Kindle. I love it as much as ever. Meantime, of course, I have been delighted by much more of her work. Thank God she was prolific, and has left us a wonderful legacy!

So many of us have had a love affair with Oliver's translucent work – work profound yet completely accessible. The day the world received the news of her death (one week ago, the day after it happened) my son and his family were visiting from interstate. We had a happy day together – yet all the time, in backdrop, was my consciousness of loss. All over facebook, other poets expressed shock and mourning too. So did many non-poets who also loved her poetry. She was undoubtedly the most popular contemporary poet in the English-speaking world, deservedly so. After her death, I read that her work was sometimes belittled by critics because of that popularity, as if it equated with a lack of literary merit – to which I can only say, 'Nonsense!' The apparent simplicity does not mean it wasn't meticulously crafted. She herself is famous for having opined that poetry shouldn't be 'fancy', and so obviously she set out to make sure hers wasn't. The right decision, clearly.  Yet she had a distinctively beautiful poetic voice, her simplicity and clarity far from banal. Like other greats, most notably Shakespeare, some of her more striking lines and phrases are widely remembered and quoted out of context. They are striking both for their powerful sentiments and the beauty of their wording.

She was primarily a nature poet, has been described as an ambassador for the environment, and stated in one poem (Messenger) that loving the world was her work. The link on her name, above, leads to her Wikipedia entry – if anyone needs to read it. I think it is well-known that she was American, a Pulitzer prize-winner, and a recipient of the National Book Award; that she lived a long time in Provincetown, Massachusetts with her partner, the photographer Mary Malone Cook, who pre-deceased her in 2005; and that her influences were Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Rumi, Hafiz, Shelley and Keats.

There have been a number of obituaries, of course, which also give details of her life and work. You can find them here. If you simply Google her name, or 'Mary Oliver poems' you'll find a lot of material too. And of course her books are available through Amazon.

You can also find many examples of her reading her work and occasionally even being interviewed about it (though she seldom gave interviews) on YouTube. This is one I enjoyed:

Though she is greatly mourned, I'm sure everyone is thankful that her poetry remains with us. This one (the final poem in House of Light) seems appropriate to share with you just now, too:

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Coming down 

out of the freezing sky

with its depths of light,

like an angel, 
or a buddha with wings,

it was beautiful 
and accurate,

striking the snow and whatever was there

with a force that left the imprint

of the tips of its wings—
five feet apart—and the grabbing 
thrust of its feet,

and the indentation of what had been running

through the white valleys 
of the snow—

and then it rose, gracefully,

and flew back to the frozen marshes

to lurk there, 
like a little lighthouse,

in the blue shadows—

so I thought:

maybe death 
isn’t darkness, after all,

but so much light 
wrapping itself around us—

as soft as feathers—

that we are instantly weary 
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes, 
not without amazement,

and let ourselves be carried,

as through the translucence of mica,

to the river 
that is without the least dapple or shadow—

that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light—

in which we are washed and washed

out of our bones.

Material shared in 'The Living Dead' is presented for study and review. Poems, photos and other writings and images remain the property of the copyright owners, where applicable (older poems may be out of copyright).

Both poems reproduced here are set out as they are in the book.