Patience

I have a good friend who, in times of crisis, swears by opening the nearest volume of poems and finding some form of answer or reprieve in whatever work you land on.  Happenstance and fate joining hands, a union of need and serendipity.  

Today two of my dearest friends began journeys, one spiritual and one physical.  In my struggle to know how to give them assistance, I tried out the aforementioned technique.  The book, New and Selected Poems Volume 2 of Mary Oliver.  The poem: Patience.  Imagine my utter shock to have wandered into those pages and come out not with a poem that is right for my friends, but one that is so utterly perfect for me.  

I struggle, often, with patience, with the letting go and letting God/the universe/the angels of our better nature.  I feel a deep joy when I wallow in some semblance of control, but of late I have noticed that is all it is--my control is nothing more than a charade, a glittery blue pool on the horizon of 110 degree day that, once approached, proves to be only sand.  So, today's poem is fitting in that I must try to stop controlling my own life, stop thinking there is a perfect word or thought or deed to accompany the events in my life and instead to breathe, to wait, to trust that what should be will be, whether I will it or not.

Patience, Mary Oliver

What is the good life now? Why,

look here, consider

the moon's white crescent

rounding, slowly, over

the half month to still another

perfect circle-

the shining eye

that lightens the hills,

that lays down the shadows

of the branches of the trees,

that summons the flowers

to open their sleepy faces and look up

into the heavens.

I used to hurry everywhere,

and leaped over the running creeks.

There wasn't

time enough for all the wonderful things

I could think of to do

in a single day. Patience

comes to the bones

before it take root in the heart

as another good idea.

I say this

as I stand in the woods

and study the patterns

of the moon shadows,

or stroll down into the waters

that now, late summer, have also

caught the fever, and hardly move

from one eternity to another.

35

This is the poem I want to live by from now on.

When Death Comes, Mary Oliver

 

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

 

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;

 

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

 

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

 

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

 

and I think of each life as a flower, as common 

as a field daisy, and as singular,

 

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth

tending as all music does, toward silence,

 

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

 

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 

When it's over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened

or full of argument.

 

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Until I Have My Own Words

Too much noise and self-doubt and future fear have silenced the words for me lately.  A few things here and there, but nothing like the onslaught that hit a year or so ago.  I remember feeling flooded with images, the pressing need to create what did not yet exist in the world.  The recent poems come, mainly, from a word I hear or read that I want to try to toy with, but the urgency is missing.  The attentive eye I used to turn towards beauty has been distracted by the dreary day to day that simply does not inspire.  So, until I have my own words, I'll share these with you.  They, tonight, make me want to write more than I've wanted to in a very long time.


   Dogfish, Mary Oliver

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman's boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don't you?

*

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

*

It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don't know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.

*

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we?

Slowly

*

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

*

You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story - - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

*

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.