Mary Oliver, Winter, death

It's the weekend again, so finishing up Mary Oliver, Twelve Moons . The poems move through the year, and I was in the winter section, so I suppose it's not surprising that they often focus on loss, death, and the indifference of nature. For example, on called "Beaver Moon--The Suicide of a friend" ends with "That night, you turn in your bed/to watch the moon rise, and once more/see what a small coin it is/against the darkness, and how everything else/is a mystery, and you know/nothing at all except/the moonlight is beautiful--/white rivers running together/along the bare boughs of trees--and somewhere, for someone, life/is becoming moment by moment/unbearable."

A similar one, called Neutralities, talks about a friend seriously injured in an accident on the icy road, and "By morning a sunrise bright as blood. I wake/hoping for my friend's life, go out/to Blackwater Woods to see what daylight makes of it,/ and find the ice hardened, children skating,/the small gospels of the fields--/dry stalks of goldenrod, tansy--whispering/la la la."

Probably the one that hit the hardest for me was "For Eleanor," since my friend Sharon just died on Tuesday after a long battle with cancer.

For Eleanor

December, and still no snow in sight.
Only this slowly lashing rain
Dashing down the last acorns in the oak tress
Over our heads, here in Massachusetts.
In Ohio, where we both were born
They have taken you back to the hospital
Where, because of things like injections
And life sustaining-fluids, and your husband
At whose urging you eat a little food
Painfully, twice a day
You will probably last until Christmas.

Miles away, under the stinging rain,
In my youth, in my vulgar good health,
I am thinking of you. I am thinking:
Enough is enough. You have a tender face.
I am your godchild and there are no gods.

Probably, sooner or later, it will snow.
The white flakes will fly over the hillsides
Smoothing out everything, settling
Calm as a sheet over a tired body.
Probably, sooner or later, you will die,
And men will find the cure for cancer.
Meanwhile, you breathe on toward Christmas--
the birthday, they say, of charity and hope.

Still, after all of the death and despair and indifferent world, the book ends with a beautiful poem about the hope of spring:


Worm Moon

In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.

2
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

3
because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping -
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run
over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.

4
Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

5
Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

6
and probably
everything
is possible.


I think I especially love the fourth stanza: Born of clay,/how shall a man be holy;/born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;/born of the seasons,/how shall a man live forever? That's the fundamental paradox of life, I think.