Mary Oliver

Inauguration Eve. Cold. And me, the mad mutterer.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

On this Sunday inauguration eve, all day long, intermittently, as I go about the things I do, I’ve been thinking of a Mary Oliver poem. As I’ve written before, a friend has been sending me a poem each day that she reads aloud in her voice as clear as winter wind. Mid-January, Vermont, is the season both of winter settling in for the long haul and, conversely, as life often is, of lengthening days. We seek the merest brightening of the light as proof of spring’s promise. In her recording, my friend mentions seeing the division of seed packets in farm store, solid evidence of spring’s inevitability.

Later, just before twilight filters in, I walk out alone, tromping the short path through the woods and cemetery to the upper edge of the village. A few flakes of snow twirl. Otherwise, no one. My boots crunch over hard, packed snow. My mind is jammed with its usual monologue, when suddenly I realize my euphoria at walking along this wide road, flanked by white pines with broken branches, a single crow winging its way over the snowy Little League field. Yes, yes. I’ve forgotten my mittens, and my hands knotted in my coat pockets throb with cold, and yet I keep chortling like a mad woman, Yes and yes and yes.

Like any writer, I’m quite capable of running wildly with words, but as for the politics and national people, I’ll simply leave Mary Oliver’s words from her poem “Work, Sometimes.”

… What are we sure of?  Happiness isn’t a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing.  Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.

Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.

You have had days like this, no doubt…. Ah, what a
moment!

As for myself, I swung the door open.  And there was
the wordless, singing world.  And I ran for my life.

Old cheese, new peonies.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

The girls come find me where I’m swimming, the water brackish, strewn with pollen. A blackbird keeps me company. The girls have snagged out-of-date cheese that’s perfectly fine and a tomato that’s sweetly ripe. At home, I dice last year’s garlic. I insist the girls admire the Bartzilla peony that’s blooming now, two blossoms and more fat buds of blossoms. The Bartzilla was a gift a number of autumns ago. My youngest planted the hairy root with me, skeptical. Now, for these few days, this peony’s a marvel.

All day, I’ve been thinking of this Mary Oliver poem. Well worth a share.

Peonies by Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises, 
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open —
pools of lace, 
white and pink —
and all day the black ants climb over them, 

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls, 
craving the sweet sap, 
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities —
and all day
under the shifty wind, 
as in a dance to the great wedding, 

the flowers bend their bright bodies, 
and tip their fragrance to the air, 
and rise, 
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness 
gladly and lightly, 
and there it is again — 
beauty the brave, the exemplary, 

blazing open. 
Do you love this world? 
Do you cherish your humble and silky life? 
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? 

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, 
and softly, 
and exclaiming of their dearness, 
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, 

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, 
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

The Promise

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Beautiful news!

Via email, I’m offered a division of a giant “butter yellow” peony. Oh, in this gray-upon-gray end of October, such a radiant promise of tender blossoms.

A piece of the Bartzella will be coming our way. Roots and dried stalks = creamy petals.

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers…

From Mary Oliver’s “Peonies”

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Okay, not a peony….

 

Tasty Treats

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A very first food my daughters ate — or gummed, more precisely — was applesauce and then bits of skinless apples, tiny juice-beading triangles.

One of my daughters — who, I can’t recall, younger, older, maybe both — named this cut-up fruit appleys. Our house had a diminutive child’s kitchen; now on our front porch, the well-used stove and sink look so small. In that wooden kitchen, the girls worked mightily with a small blue frying pan, a white colander, and a collection of found things — miniature jam jars, colored wooden beads, petite bottles in the shape of maple leaves and hearts I filled with our maple syrup and sold as wedding favors.

Every now and then, tidying up, I’d find a silver measuring cup sourced from my kitchen, with the dried remains of tiny apple triangles.

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones….

— Mary Oliver

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Loon Recovery Project

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

 

Late last night, while my daughter ate a grilled cheese sandwich before the wood stove, we talked about a slideshow about Vermont loons we’d attended at our library and, with the cold deepening around our house, reminisced about summer nights camping at Ricker Pond in Groton, when we lay awake in our tent and listened to the loons’ wildly beautiful tremolo – a call so bizarre it hovers between our world and the mystery of the unknown.

Remember? she asked. Remember?

Perhaps for no other reason than it’s the last day of January, and winter’s teeth are easing sufficiently I know spring isn’t far in the offing, here’s a Mary Oliver poem.

Lead

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

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Postcards From the Past

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Looking for baby pictures for her senior high school yearbook page, my teenager came across a postcard from long ago I’d stashed in a box. My father had mailed me the card when I was sophomore in college (about a 100 years ago), and it had been thumbtacked over my desk for years – once scribbled upon by the girl who’s now a teenager, when she was a toddler. On the back, my father had written that famous Hemingway quote, about the little new each of us has to give: fatherly advice, about the costliness of knowledge.

In my less confident mothering moments, I wonder if I’ve learned anything.

Last night, reading Mary Oliver, I found a line that reoccurs in her poetry, over and over, like a familiar stitch: take responsibility for your life. One of the very simplest things, and yet one of the hardest. The flip side is I force myself not to responsibility for all of my daughters’ lives, too. Put your hand through a window at 17? Odd and hard as it may seem, I believed it would be theft for me to take my daughter’s responsibility for that action.

I think of my toddler in her pink waffle-weave long underwear, going at this postcard with a gleam in her eye and my felt-tipped pen in her hand. At some point, I realized I had to let her grow up; at some point I realized I had to do the harder thing, and step back.

But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness… And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe – that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

– Mary Oliver, Upstream

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