Mary Oliver—poet, essayist, patron saint of attention—left, and continues to leave, deep imprints in my life and faith.
It’s easy to love Mary Oliver’s poetry. Her poetry is accessible. Her poetry is humble. But that doesn’t mean her poetry isn’t excellent. It is. And it is consistently excellent and inviting. A rare combo, which is why she’s been such a beloved figure in American poetry for decades. Even after her death. Mary Oliver died on January 17, 2019.
So, it is neither impressive or original that I love Mary Oliver’s poetry. My introduction to Oliver is unremarkable, too, except that I was in my 30s when I first encountered her words. It didn’t take long before I was making space on the bookshelf for her. Oliver’s poetry has imprinted itself onto my life, writing, and faith more so than perhaps any other poet—including my boy, Ted Kooser.
(Which is saying something, because I may or may not have driven two hours out of my way on a trip to Omaha to look for Kooser’s home in the Nebraska countryside, to ask him to sign copies of his books, only to chicken out at the edge of his driveway. But that’s a story for another time.)
This post is an attempt at tribute. Because imprints matter. They matter even when being honest about problem areas in her theology and life. And there are some. But literary heroes are almost always at least somewhat problematic. That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s a testament to God’s common grace that flawed figures can illuminate areas of our lives and actions in redemptive and generative ways that we never knew we needed.
Here, then, are some breadcrumbs of gratitude. May they be broken, blessed, and taken in hope that light can pour into the corners of our lives most in need of it.
1.
Every so often, our family will read the same poem a week at breakfast with the goal of memorizing all or part of it. The first poem we memorized was Oliver’s “Black Swallowtail” from Red Bird. Our kids still love to talk about the caterpillar who is “eating, always eating” and who “took nothing with it / Except faith, and patience.”
2.
I recited “Black Swallowtail” at a team meeting at work when my promotion was announced.
3.
Our family memorized quite a bit of “I Don’t Want to Live a Small Life,” also from Red Bird. The last line goes, “Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.” It’s become a kind of inside joke or “code” to receiving things when we want to sulk in pouty attitudes. It’s been quoted to me when I’ve needed an attitude adjustment. When I picture Jesus saying, “Open your life, open your hands,” it helps to remember that God’s way of dealing with us is one of abundance, not scarcity.
4.
Oliver came from hard places. Her childhood was dark, bleak, abusive. To have my adoptive children memorize her poetry is an act of defiance, of redemption. Here, look kids. Starting points don’t define your story. Take faith and patience and see what God does.
5.
Even if we’re not from hard places, we walk through hard places in life. Sometimes for years. Her poem “The Uses of Sorrow” helped Lindsey and I process our infertility in a particularly dark season a couple years ago.
6.
I have written previously about some of her thoughts on attention and how vital attention is to going about the work we’ve been given to do. Attention, especially to what’s happening in the natural world, is the defining theme in her body of work.
7.
When Mary Oliver died, I wrote a poem—not about her, or even thanking her, but about the state of my life at that time and how far my reality diverged from my aspirations. The poem takes its starting place from perhaps Oliver’s most famous poem, “The Summer Day,” which ends thusly:
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
For me, that second question is more terrifying than the first. The fear and un-finality of death have been removed for me. But life, my one wild, and precious life, and what to do with it? Instant anxiety. I was in a uniquely anxious, transitional state in January 2019. I look at it now and I’ve learned to a be little more kind to the person who wrote it. It does serve as a reminder that even in dry, frustrating seasons of life good can come from it. And that maybe those seasons turn out to be more fruitful than we know. Reading it now, so close after the start of the new year, is helpful, even for me, to remember that we can always start again. That God is a God of new beginnings, even when we tire of opening up our life and our hands to what will come next.
TO MARY OLIVER ON HER DEATHBED
I once grew words inside me
and I would pick them
in the mornings or sometimes
on walks in the afternoon sun.
They have since seemed to wither
in a drought of habit,
replaced with guilty weeds that
misplace means for ends.
The soil sleeps as I do,
a mess of desire and missed alarms
while the grasshoppers plunk
at their typewriters with a consistency of instinct.
I look for metaphors in the dry air
and feel the frustration
of trying too hard, the dew point of grace
too low to manifest itself.
What is it that I want from
this one wild life?
To ask this question without
being crushed by it.
