My Mary Oliver Story

 

I knew I was overdue to make a run to the grocery store when I found myself standing in front of the open refrigerator in the middle of the night snacking on cooked, cold cauliflower with the dog. He loves it and I only eat it because it’s good for something besides adding pounds on my hips or spiking my blood pressure. Levi will probably out live me; he loves all the vegetables on the ‘color wheel’ and I’m all about the dressing and croutons that goes on top of salads. My normal mid-night raiding bounty is sugar free parfait snack cups. Twenty-five calories topped with twenty more calories of sugar free whipped cream from a can. You gotta love whoever it was who invented spray cans and sweet, bread and butter pickle chips. I’ve never eaten the two together but I’m not dead yet and that’s still on my Bucket List.

Seven years ago when I couldn’t sleep I wrote new blog posts. My husband had recently passed away and I wrote more philosophical stuff than I do now. Case in point: “I am reminded of a passage I read in a book a long time ago, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden: ‘We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.’ Grief and its aftermath is that kind of a force that makes us find a new direction in our lives, an uncharted course that eventually picks its way back down the hill with the volume of our tears added to its flow.” I’m not sure if my sentence about grief and its aftermath is brilliant, sappy or cliché but it’s as close to Mary Oliver as I’ll ever write.

“And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. 'Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?'”

Mary Oliver

Do you know how hard it is get a Pulitzer Prize in poetry? Actually, I don’t but considering how few people voluntarily sit down and read a book of poems I’m guessing it’s pretty difficult. Mary also got the prestigious National Book Award as well as other great honors to add to her resume. She started writing poems at fourteen. And so did I. Her writer’s voice came from living a hard life in a dysfunctional family that included sexual abuse that caused her to focus more on poignant observances of the natural world around her instead of on what was happening to her. My early poems came with common teenage hormones---little, love sick crushes and bruises that no other eyes than mine has ever seen. It’s on my Bucket List to destroy those poems soon, another part of my past gone. How many parts will end up on the trash heap before I’m no longer me?  

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Mary Oliver

While Mary was writing about things that resonates world-wild, my teenaged mind was coming up with trite like this: 

My heart stands naked

Like the wintered dogwood tree

And the wind blows strongly

Through the branches left to see.

The snow lies heavy

On the cold, harden bark

And the limbs bow lowly

As the day turns dark.

Yadda, yadda, yadda and after a few more verses I predicted the boy who dumped me would come back in the spring when dogwood blossoms. Re-reading some of my old poems this morning reaffirms the fact that I need to stick to writing memoir-style prose. And here's your laugh for the day: I don't even remember the guy's name who broke my heart. ©

 "Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”

Arthur Golden