Mary Oliver

Living in a Dying World

I finally understand how to enter into palliative care for the earth, humans, and all living beings.

I finally comprehend my way of being in this world as this world is being destroyed.

This is the way I’ll live on this land until my body returns to the land. I say this to myself, now, because I’m afraid I’ll wake up in the morning and this feeling, this understanding, will be gone, like a dream.

I say what I say and write what I write to remember what I’ll otherwise lose in a moment, in a flash, when the wrong noise makes my body tighten, when the wrong move makes me brace, when the wrong memory, reawakened, makes me run.

We’re all just walking each other home, as Ram Dass says. “Said,” technically, because the perpetually present-tense world we want to create—especially in poetry—is an illusion.

Past and future exist and matter, even if it’s only because we perceive them and need them in order to make sense of the everything that’s doing and being and moving and thrumming and creating and re-creating everything all the time. Call it God. Call it Gaia. Call it what you will. Call it nothing. It’s still everything.

Past and future inform us in ways we understand and in ways we never will.

Maybe we don’t need perfect understanding.

Maybe love is all that’s perfect and timeless and always available to us, not in a greeting card way but in that way where something is so profound we need the simplest language to discuss, express, share and feel it.

We need a little carving of a heart to hold what can’t be contained, just as we need talismen to keep big, scary things that can’t be named or tamed at bay.

I think it’s Mary Oliver who calls what lies beyond language the ineffable. I can’t find that quote right now, but I did find this passage Oliver wrote that feels perfect for this moment precisely because it situates every moment, every life—everything—within the larger whole of eternity:

Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.

Yes, yes. All the yesses. Oh, Mary. My heart. My heart.

But back to Ram Dass. He’s dead. He died three years ago. He doesn’t say anything now except what he’s left behind with us. Maybe that’s our afterlife, our everlastingness: What we teach each other, what we share with each other, how we love each other, how we fight for each other.

Maybe that’s heaven. Maybe that’s our forever, written not in the clouds but right here where we walk and crawl and kneel and drag ourselves from one day to the next over rough land, over stone, over grasses, over loam.

Regardless, these are things we can do now, while we’re living: teach, share, love, fight.

We can interlace our fingers and move forward, together, until we can no longer move, until we die of natural causes, not from hate or from being cut off from others, from community, from those on whom we all rely for our lives and our well-being.

Every one of us can reach deep into love and, in so doing, become part of a whole that transcends who we are as individuals. No censorship needed. No isolation needed. No shunning. No shaming. No guilt. No fear.

Hold those you love close, and love everyone. I’m begging you.

May you all swim forever in the stream. I’ll try if you will.

—

Sunday, November 20, is Transgender Day of Remembrance. This essay is, in part, a call to end the hate that results in trans people being killed just for being who they are, loving who they love, and being some of the bravest people who walk this earth.

Love can stop these needless deaths. We can stop this. Let’s make it stop.

O’Grady-Orff

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

—

To name ourselves rather than be named / we must first see ourselves … / So long unmirrored in our true selves / we may have forgotten how we look. — Lorraine O’Grady, epigraph for Bluest Nude: Poems, by Ama Codjoe

My poem / is finished and I haven’t mentioned / orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call / it ORANGES. — Frank O’Hara

He folded himself from the corners inward / and then again in triangles. When the nurse came in / to check on him, he was gone, the sheets smooth / as a pond at first light. — Charlie O’Hay

They are saying          these boys

          are fictions stoning other fictions          These are the punishments

that attend          These are ghosts throwing at nothing

— Miller Oberman

You forget / the contours slowly, in / the long second leaving, / neutrality a structure / you learned to glamorize, / the way you have come to / imagine doors as rectangular. — Cindy Juyoung Ok

As anticipated as a commercial holiday. / It was always before / whatever was coming next. — Robert Okaji

He is not / a fragment, but a symptom / of light creeping across / the desert. — Robert Okaji

How difficult to be lost. / So easy to remain unseen. — Robert Okaji

Listen. / The earth, too, considers you limitless. — Robert Okaji

oh, to be / that tongue / and palate, / those lips / surrounding you, / to be your / consonant / in a field of vowels. — Robert Okaji

What you call / home I call / diminishment. What you / surrender, I bundle / and mail to strangers. — Robert Okaji

Like flowers, / We did not know we were petals / Until only the last one remained. — Star Okpeh

My work is loving the world. / Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — / equal seekers of sweetness. — Mary Oliver

Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world’s willingness to receive it–indeed the world’s need of it–these never pass. — Mary Oliver

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. — Mary Oliver

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things. — Mary Oliver

Poetry shouldn’t explain anything, particularly to those who demand explanations. — Yoshev Omed

In the wavering balance of my feelings
set against each other
lascivious love and modesty
but I choose what I see
and submit my neck to the yoke;
I yield to the sweet yoke.

—

In trutina mentis dubia
fluctuant contrarian
lascivus amor et pudicitia.
Sed eligo quod video,
collum iugo prebeo:
ad iugum tamen suave transeo.

— Carl Orff, “In Trutina,” from Camina Burana

Olim lacus colueram / olim pulcher exiteram, / dum cignus ego fueram. / Miser, miser! / Modo niger / et ustus fortiter.

Once I dwelt in the lakes, / once I was beautiful, / while I was a swan. / Miserable, miserable! / Now black / and burnt fiercely.

— Carl Orff, “Olim Lacus Colueram,” from Carmina Burana

Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its value and purpose, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives. — Gregory Orr

When poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they’re both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them. ― Gregory Orr

I open my eyes & my father is driving me / to our new home at the edge of the world. / the wind tells me this is the genesis of / my despair. — Praise Osawaru