Mary Oliver, poet, and Loren's Soul

Loren (left) after a hard hike with the Florida Trails Association (2009); below, Mary Oliver, website phot0.

My cousin Leo's wife, Kathy Curro, whom I call cousin Kathy, introduced me to poet Mary Oliver. What a gift. I don't know how I missed her all these years, a contemporary, a prolific writer, and recipient of so many literature awards. Here I am in Ukraine, on a journey of discovery, and I learn from an American poet, in simple but powerful verse, why I might be here!
When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
"When Death Comes," from New and Selected Poems (1992), which won a National Book Award.

Mary Oliver was born in a small town in Ohio, outside of Cleveland, moved to New England, and then to Provincetown, where she lived with her lifelong partner Molly Malone Cook, a photographer and her literary agent, until Molly's death in 2005 (from Wikipedia and Oliver biographies online).

Oliver still lives in Provincetown, and no one has glorified its details, its natural world, it rhythms and wonders more than her. Nature has been her inspiration, in the tradition of Thoreau and Whitman, and in her poetry she infuses it with wisdom, purpose and meaning for our daily lives. It won her the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1984, for her fifth collection of poems, American Primitive.

She writes of Molly's death the way I would like to write about Loren's, in "The Soul at Last."The Lord's terrifying kindness has come to me.

It was only a small silvery thing--say a piece of silver cloth, or a thousand spider webs woven together, or a small handful of aspen leaves, with their silver backs shimmering. And it came leaping out of the closed coffin; it flew into the air, it danced snappingly around the church rafters, it vanished through the ceiling.

I spoke there, briefly, of the loved one gone. I gazed at the people in the pews, some of them weeping. I knew I must, someday, write this down.
This poem could be about Loren's soul, too. Death, "the Lord's terryifying kindness," came to us, and Loren's soul floated up to the heavens. I've tried to imagine it: Loren alone on that Aucilla river basin trail, falling behind the others, a hiker friend going back to check on him and finding him breathless, falling to his knees, falling to the ground. She offers water, then realizes she must run for help, back to the beginning of the trailhead, about 5 miles. She asks Loren if he is okay; he says "yes," she told us, then leaves him water, says she'll be back, and runs off. That was Loren’s last word, I guess. “Yes,” I am okay.

Then what happened? Loren was alone. Maybe he thought he was okay. We don't know. Another friend on the hike came upon him and, he told us later, at Loren’s gathering at the funeral home, found Loren motionless, on the ground, lying against a tree, I think he said. We wanted to hear it all, get all the details, but it was so hard to hear, harder to grasp. The friend tried mouth-to-mouth resusitation, but Loren did not respond. So how long must it have been for Loren, alone, dying, taking his last breath, between the first friend who ran for help (a long run to call an ambulance and then to reach him on a difficult trail) and the second hiker who found him dead. Maybe twenty minutes? forty-five minutes? Longer?

I try to imagine it. How was it? Was there pain? Did he know? Did he feel alone? Was he scared? Did he see a bright white light, calling him? Did he see our mom? The goddess? Hear angels of death? If only I could have been there, by his side, to hold his hand, to whisper “I love you,” to tell him he is with us forever, dearly loved.

I imagine that I see his soul rising from his body, which he had woefully neglected and which had given him so many challenges. I see it floating from his body, from the place where he lay alone on that trail, a trail he loved we were told. I see that trail and the woods embracing him, filling him with love. I see that small silver fleck, like a feather, flying in tandem with an elegant white Eagle, joyous and free. It's the very same eagle Loren said he saw right after our mom died, on a St. Mark's trail, saying she was okay, she was where she wanted to be. Loren's soul, soaring above the rivers, the woods, the wetlands, the trails.

I can't begin to write like Mary Oliver, but I can hear her songs, feel her voice in the way she makes nature come alive, anthropomorphizes it (if there is such a word), gives it human form and feelings. I think Loren could, too. That's why Kathy sent me her poems, with the message, "I think of Loren on every page." Yes. I see that, and it brings some comfort., and also sadness.

Then my mind takes over, and I think that all this talk about the soul is pure drama. It is all imagination, it is make-believe, wishful thinking, hogwash. There is no "other side." It doesn't mean a thing.

And yet, it is all we have.

"Wild Geese," from Owls and Other Fantasies (2003)

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

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.

"Grass" from White Pine (1994)

Those who are disappointed, betrayed, scarified! Those who would still put their hands upon me! Those who belong to the past!

How many of us have weighted the years of groaning and weeping? How many years have I done it, how many nights spent panting, hating, grieving, oh, merciless, pitiless remembrances!

I walk over the green hillsides. I lie down on the harsh, sun flavored blades and bundles of grass; the grass cares nothing about me, it doesn't want anything from me, it rises to its own purpose, and sweetly, following the single holy dictum: to be itself, to let the sky be the sky, to let a young girl be a young girl freely--to let a middle-aged woman be, comfortably, a middle-aged woman.

Those bloody sharps and flats--those endless calamities of the personal past. Bah! I disown them from the rest of my life, in which I mean to rest.

Postscript: This was the hardest blog to write.