Wild Fridays #8: The Living Dead

  








Breakage

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
        full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Angels

You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not
entirely anyway, other people’s
heads. 

I’ll just leave you with this.
I don’t care how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance. 

Watering the Stones

Every summer I gather a few stones from
the beach and keep them in a glass bowl.
Now and again I cover them with water,
and they drink. There’s no question about
this; I put tinfoil over the bowl, tightly,
yet the water disappears. This doesn’t
mean we ever have a conversation, or that
they have the kind of feelings we do, yet
it might mean something. Whatever the
stones are, they don’t lie in the water
and do nothing.

Some of my friends refuse to believe it
happens, even though they’ve seen it. But
a few others—I’ve seen them walking down
the beach holding a few stones, and they
look at them rather more closely now.
Once in a while, I swear, I’ve even heard
one or two of them saying “Hello.”
Which, I think, does no harm to anyone or
anything, does it?

– By Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
(These poems are not in the book pictured here; I chose it because her photo is on the cover.)

There are times for facing up to the serious problems of the world, and trying to figure out what we can do to create change. And then there are other times when we long for some moments of peace, to remember all the lovely things there are about the world and what it is that we want to preserve if we can; even, perhaps, to contemplate spiritual mysteries, believing in powers for good beyond the immediately apparent.

Finding myself in that second mood, I had a yen for the poetry of Mary Oliver, who so delights in the natural world and reveals it to us with unsurpassed beauty. I own several of her books, but I found these particular poems online (as part of an article on her work by Alex Luppens-Dale at a site called Book Riot). They all have the gentleness and wonder which I craved. 

The first is grounded in the natural world, showing us how to pay close attention to its details, to learn about its truths and mysteries. She is a master at showing us how the factual is also, simultaneously, miraculous. The fact that in this piece the wonder resides in broken, damaged things seems appropriate just now – a necessary reminder, in our troubled times, that it can be so.

And then the next two deal almost matter-of-factly with the mystical/magical in a way that I find absolutely engaging. Well, it happens that I am one for whom angels exist and stones are sentient beings – but even if not, I think I might find these poems delightfully persuasive.

Reading Mary Oliver always seems calming, somehow, at the same time as it awakens me to boundless possibilities. Entertaining the idea of dancing angels, contemplating stones that drink, or piecing together the meaning in broken shells – all these suddenly seem valid, worthy pursuits, just as important as worrying about all the serious practical matters which demand our attention.

Do we need poems like these as a temporary relief from more disturbing preoccupations, a means of restoring ourselves so as to go on trying to cope and find answers? Or are the things Oliver engages with the very things which make the state of the planet – and humanity – matter?

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).