Mary Oliver

In reading, last week, the many tributes to the beloved poet Mary Oliver, now deceased, I was most struck by the accompanying images of her incredible face. It seems like her face might have been her greatest poem. Maybe the lines engraved there are the lines that she tried but failed to get down on paper, lines about things too deep and essential to be captured or ruined by words. Still, the words she did put down were fine ones, and a source of pleasure and inspiration to many, many people, more than most poets reach but fewer than are reached by lyricists of popular songs. But that's the way it should be. Her path was her path. People often quote the last two lines of this poem, but they don't really resonate without all the poem that comes before them. What will you do? Without the full poem, the mind leaps too easily to significant things, yet it's as simple as noticing and holding a grasshopper, or better yet, as exalted as a being a grasshopper floating away.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
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?