Random Ramblings

So the major themes in the poems I read today were humans transforming because of nature, the general transforming power of nature (especially death to life/life to death), and what happens after death. I like a lot of these so I'm including them in their entirety:

Harvest Moon--The Mockingbird Sings in the Night

Harvest Moon - The Mockingbird Sings in the Night - Mary Oliver

No sky could hold
so much light -
and here comes the brimming,
the flooding and streaming
out of the clouds
and into the leaves,
glazing the creeks,
the smallest ditches!
And so many stars!
The sky seems stretched
like an old black cloth;
behind it, all
the celestial fire
we ever dreamed of!
And the moon steps lower,
quietly changing
her luminous masks, brushing
everything as she passes
with her slow hands
and soft lips -
clusters of dark grapes,
apples swinging like lost planets,
melons cool and heavy as bodies -
and the mockingbird wakes
in his hidden castle;
out of the silver tangle
of thorns and leaves
he flutters and tumbles,
spilling long
ribbons of music
over forest and river,
copse and cloud -
all heaven and all earth -
wherever the white moon
fancies her small wild prince -
field after field after field.

She has several poems about how nature transforms you. In Sturgeon Moon: The Death of Meriwether Lewis, she talks about Lewis (from Lewis and Clark_ and how "During the years/Jefferson thought the whole expedition/had vanished, he must have been feeling/the sharp, the fatal exchange/of his life as it flowed forth into/the world around him--as he became/the rivers, the plains full of drak/beasts browsing peacefully/by the thousands. The trees/felt his hand upon then and tried to let/their secret of longevity sift forth/ sprinkinling it into his eyes. He returned/from that wild green America,/but hardly what he'd been--more river water/in his veins than blood, more leaves/than flesh, more earth/than ego."

In one of them, the transformation possible seems also to be perhaps talking about suicide? Which I suppose fits with the theme of death in transformation in the book as a whole:

At Blackwater Pond:
You know how it feels,
wanting to walk into
the rain and disappear —
wanting to feel your life
brighten and grow weightless
as a leaf in the fall.
And sometimes, for a moment,
you feel it beginning — the sense
of escape sharp as a knife-blade
hangs over the dark field
of your body, and your soul
waits just under the skin
to leap away over the water.
But the blade,
at the last minute, hesitates
and does not fall,
and the body does not open,
and you are what you are —
trapped, heavy and visible
under the rain, only your vision
delicate as old leaves skimming
over the mounds of seasons,
the limits of everything,
the few shaped bones of time.


Another poem about bones, and how nature transforms things, life to death and death to life, is "Bone Poem:"

The litter under the tree
Where the owl eats -shrapnel

Of rat bones, gull debris -
Sinks into the wet leaves

Where time stirs with her slow spoon,
Where we becomes singular, and a quickening

From light-years away
Saves and maintains. O holy

Protein, o hallowed lime,
O precious clay!

Tossed under the tree
The cracked bones

Of the owl's most recent feast
Lean like shipwreck, starting

The long fall back to the center -
The seepage, the flowing,

The equity: sooner or later
In the shimmering leaves

The rat will learn to fly, the owl
Will be devoured.
************
I wonder if the focus on death and transformation is because of her father's death? There is a poem about him, too:

Poem for My Father's Ghost

Now is my father

A traveler, like all the bold men
He talked of, endlessly
And with boundless admiration,
over the supper table,
Or gazing up from his white pillow—
Book on his lap, always, until
Even that grew too heavy to hold.

Now is my father free of all binding fevers.
Now is my father
Traveling where there is no road.

Finally, he could not lift a hand
To cover his eyes.
Now he climbs to the eye of the river,
He strides through the Dakotas,
He disappears into the mountains. And though he looks
Cold and hungry as any man
At the end of a questing season,

He is one of them now:
He cannot be stopped.

Now is my father
Walking the wind,
Sniffing the deep Pacific
That begins at the end of the world.

Vanished from us utterly,
Now is my father circling the deepest forest—
Then turning in to the last red campfire burning
In the final hills,

Where chieftains, warriors and heroes
Rise and make him welcome,
Recognizing, under the shambles of his body,
A brother who has walked his thousand miles.

Back to Mary Oliver, since it is once again the weekend. Today's chapters were on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walt Whitman, both in their own ways mystical/spiritual poets, both who famously reflected on nature as a source of the divine. Since Mary Oliver is the poet who for me embodies finding the spiritual in nature, it is interesting to see her writing about poets who served that function for her.

I had no idea that Hopkins had destroyed all the poetry he wrote before he became a Jesuit, and only took up writing again when a bishop felt that some nuns who died in a tragic shipwreck should be remembered. That seems so reflective of a specific type of ascetic Catholicism, though, and Oliver points out that Hopkins was a Jesuit, who did (especially at the time) have very severe spiritual disciplines (more rigor, more prayer, more work, more abstinence) which "wore him to the bone" and she even implies led to his early death. In his Jesuit poetry, she points to different phases--the lyrical poems that we all know and love, and a darker period.

Reading about Whitman is an interesting contrast. In many ways they were very, very different, both in the forms of their poetry (I have never made it through Song of Myself, so I didn't realize it was 62 pages long!), and in their attitudes about self-discipline v. self-expression ("I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass" has nothing of the Jesuit discipline about it). But as Oliver points out, Whitman fits William James' definition of a mystic: "Whether WHitman had an actual mystical experience or not, his was a sensibility so passionate, so affirmative and optimistic, that it is fair to speak of him as writing out of a kind of hovering mystical cloud (62)." Later she says "Eroticism is, both as eroticism exactly and as metaphor, what Leaves of Grass advocates: the healthy, heavy seeded life of the soul."

I don't know enough Whitman to say whether or not that is true, but I do think that's true for Oliver's work: she sees spirituality in the erotic, the carnal, the life-affirming materiality of the world that bursts out with joy.

It is the weekend, so a break from Chodron to read Mary Oliver. This section of the book Winter Hours is fewer essays but more poems. The one essay introduces a poem about swans and talks about some of the principles she uses in her poetry, which include having a sincere energy, having a spiritual purpose, containing some moment of earthly delight, and asking a question that the reader must answer. Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to her poetry; the combination of the earthly and the spiritual really draws me in.

I hadn't read any of the poems in this section before, and I'm not going to type them all out here, but there were a couple of lines I loved. In "The Swan," there is this line: "Said Mrs. Blake of the poet, "I miss my husband's company. He is so often in paradise. Of course! The path to heaven doesn't lie down it flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive the world". Poor Mrs. Blake, whose husband was occupied with contemplation of the beauties of the universe! An early example of a football widow, only with poetry. It does make me wonder if Oliver herself was married.

It also points to the idea that poetry is ultimately a way of seeing. I do love the corporeality of Oliver's spirituality; I think that's what makes her accessible, since many of use experience joy in the beauties of nature, and in a way she's just highlighting that.

The other lines I loved in this section were from "Moss:" "Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory or an archetypal memory but something far older--a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory. Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything. To perceive of the earth as round needed something else--standing up!--that hadn't yet happened....[W]hen I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly. sweet cousin."

I recently saw something on tumblr talking about how we share 25% of our DNA with trees, so we are genetically related to plants. I do love that idea of our fellowship with plants and animals.

Reading her process for writing poetry made me think I should stretch my own creative muscles a little.

Seeking the light:

Daybreak for me began, this sabbath day, with a phone call reminder to order my CPAP supplies,
then the little steel box that connects me to the world gave me a beautiful image:
the Northern Lights in Iceland.
Solar Storms brought the Northern lights here,
or so they said,
but only the camera's eye, not mine,
could see them.
Better to see on my little screen, where the line between illusions and reality is no longer clear--
is this a hallucination dreamed by a computer, or a hallucination dreamed by me?

Today my friend starts out on a journey to Yellowknife, Canada
to see the Northern Lights in person.
She's been to Iceland and eaten the rotting shark
but the lights eluded her then.
Perhaps she will find them now.

Is seeking the experience of the real worthwhile?

This time via musesfool on LJ. Cut for length.

A List of Praises
by Anne Porter ( Read more... )

Via Joellyn Monahan on Facebook:

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

"Thanks" From the Rain in the Trees, by W.S Merwin, 1998