Poet Mary Oliver died on Thursday. Aged 83, she died at her home in Hobe Sound, Florida. I knew she was sick, but leaving her nearly lifelong home on Cape Cod for Florida made no sense to me—she must have had her reasons. Hobe Sound is beautiful—on the Atlantic, it has a National Wildlife Park and another nature park besides. Mary’s kind of place.
Reading this, you might assume that I knew her. I didn’t, but her poetry made me feel that I did. And when someone I care for dies—and I did care for her, the idea of her—thoughts of an actual afterlife fill my head. For Mary Oliver, I hope that she is now in a very New England and sylvan version, one on a pond, with the ocean visible over a bluff. She is reunited with her Molly Malone Cook and her dogs, of course. All of them.
An expert archer, Mary Oliver’s poems were her arrows: set into flight, not high, but true, hitting their targets with satisfying piercings.
Stephen Dobyns (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephen-dobyns) wrote, “Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward.”
Here is one you may know (with apologies to her estate). There are many more:
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?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=mary+oliver
