I feel a little anxious when picking from titles. What if I don’t like the poem, and then I have to write down for you to read that I didn’t like the poem? And then what if everyone else recognized what a fantastic poem it is, and I have revealed my ignorance. This is some trouble that comes when I write in public.
Anyhow, tonight the poems — because there is more than one, again — come from Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems: Volume One. I started with a poem near the end of the book, “The House” (p. 244; and you can find it here). When I started reading the poem, a feeling of foreboding came over me, and I thought, in particular, of romantic relationships, partnerships, and how things can shift and fall apart almost without one’s noticing.
We did not hear, beneath our lives,
The old walls falling out of true,
Foundations shifting in the dark.
And then a little later in the relatively short poem…
We made our minor, brief repairs,
And sang upon the crumbling stairs
And danced upon the sodden floors.
Until…
For years we lived at peace, until
The rooms themselves began to blend
With time, and empty one by one,
At which we knew, with muted hearts,
That nothing further could be done
I see, by the end of the poem, aging and death as its themes. And not the slow, quiet falling apart of relationships. But one of my own fears is that in my own romantic partnership, we would drift apart so slowly that by the time we realized we had lost our foundation, it would be too late to recover. So there’s where the chill in the reading comes from for me. And I’m left feeling slightly hollow.
Mary Oliver just seems to be like that for me, though. Beautiful poems that leave me a little hollow with sadness or fear or apprehension.
The next poem I skipped to, just flipping through the book, was “A Visitor” (p. 116; it is the second poem here). I assumed on first read that the father was dead and coming to the author in her dreams. That she turned him away, unready to face him or to reconcile or to even accept the part of herself that loves him. And that she then experiences some internal shift and was able to come to terms with him, with her past, with that part of herself. Reading it again I realized that the father could just be old, and in need, and not dead and in dreams. She writes:
But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell openand I knew I was saved
and could bear him
I hope someday I can be at that place with my own father. But not yet.
Hm, still feeling kind of hollow after that one, I kept flipping through the book and came to “Dogfish” (p. 103; it can be read here, among many other places). It’s a longer poem, and I still need to think about it longer before I have something really distilled to say about it. But I will end this post with the end of the poem, in which the dogfish is preying upon three smaller fish. (Please go read the whole poem, though. And if you have something to say about it, comment).
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.*
And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,they can do it.
Recent Comments