​​Mary Oliver: Poetry as a Mode of Caring

Photo by Brendan McInerney (instagram: @mcnrny)

 
”…liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves” —Adrienne Rich

When I look to another human being with a sense of bewilderment, I try to conjure the way Mary Oliver sees a stone—

Do stones feel?
Do they love their life?
Or does patience drown out everything else?

When I walk on the beach I gather a few
white ones, dark ones, the multiple colors.
Don’t worry, I say, I’ll bring you back, and I do.

The act of reading Mary Oliver is an act of radical empathy; sometimes you find yourself wondering how a stone feels. Sometimes, you find yourself interrogating a rose garden. More often still, you find yourself asking about how a dog’s thoughts—unknowable—can teach you something about your own. At the core of most of her poetry is a question, or a series of questions, rarely satisfied with an answer. And in a time where most people in power assure us they have an answer for everything, I look to Mary Oliver for guidance.

Take “Mysteries Yes”—

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
”look!” and laugh in the astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Through sparse, approachable language, Oliver asks questions of nature and humanity. The speaker nudges the reader to reflect on how we are similar to the earth we inhabit, and how we are different—how stones (here they are, again) obey gravity, and humans dream of defying it. But, after all of these questions, where do we land? With a bowed head and an exclamation, the speaker rejects the desire to know the answers, and instead delights in bearing witness to the question in the first place.

Without a collective effort to care for our planet, there will soon be no other modes of caring. Mary Oliver, with her specific, patient, and egoless reflection on nature, is participating in a type of caring for the earth. She often pushes back against the empirical in her poetry, but always in defense of nature—she finds humility and magic in admitting one can never know it all. And, I think this type of check on authority and ego is essential to our survival.

In “Whistling Swans”, she begins with an image of a bowed head instead of ending on it: “Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look /up into the blue space?/…Even when swans are flying north and making/ such a ruckus of noise, God is surely listening/ and understanding.”
Here, Oliver at once likens the swans to humans through prayer, while also distinguishing our difference—the language we speak. It is a remarkable move with such simple language. And, this throughline of humility—the images of the bowed head—continues through the end of the poem:

And furthermore, don’t you imagine (I just suggest it)
that the swans know about as much as we do about
the whole business?

So listen to them and watch them, singing as they fly.
Take from it what you can.

The word “furthermore” and that parenthetical “I just suggest it” imply that the speaker of the poem is having an argument, of sorts, with the reader; they’re attempting to persuade the “you” to take heed and to listen to the swans. With deep wisdom also comes a desire to share what one’s learned in nature; to warn; to go back before it’s too late! Some poems, like “Whistling Swans”, only gently plead with the reader; others, like “Of the Empire” directly critique our society and what’s at stake if we don’t examine our behavior.

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and awarded amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life fore
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feeling of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

You can’t help but read this poem—published in 2008—and think of the COVID-19 pandemic and our current climate crisis in 2020. As individuals who recognize that we’re collectively going through a watershed moment in history, Oliver’s depiction of how an empire will be remembered has striking similarities to the United States, not only in its description, but in its tense—we feared, we adored; we are in the past tense, in other words, because this mode of living is not sustainable. It will lead to our demise.

“Of Empire” isn’t the best of Oliver’s poetry—I think of it more as a sermon, a speech that makes an explicit judgment and equips us with another lens through which we can read other poems she’s written. This lens is colored with rage, and as you revisit other poems, you can see this current of anger bubble up in different forms. But I believe Oliver’s most effective appeals come through her reverence for the earth, and when she mourns it—her project of likening the reader to a river, a stone, a dog, or a fox can sometime set you up for unadulterated despair, as in “Red”:

All the while
I was teaching
in the state of Virginia
I wanted to see a gray fox.
Finally I found him.
He was in the highway.
He was singing
his death song.
I picked him up
and carried him
into a field
while the cars kept coming.
He showed me
how he could ripple
how he could bleed.
Goodbye I said
to the light of his eye
as the cars went by.
Two mornings later
I found the other.
She was in the highway.
She was singing
her death song.
I picked her up
and carried her
into the field
where she rippled
half of her gray
half of her red
while the cars kept coming.
While the cars kept coming.
Gray fox and gray fox
Red, red, red.

Mouth agape, I wept the first time I read this poem. With simple repetition of lines and phrases—in the highway/rippled/the cars kept coming—”Red” feels like an incantation. It also feels, in the context of this poem, like an inevitability. The cars kept coming: Red, red, red.

Mary Oliver died in 2019, before the 21st century grappled with a pandemic. I often think of her by my side as I take my morning walk with my dog on Rockaway Beach. In November, there are only a few other beach walkers who dare brave the early morning cold; all of them wearing cloth face masks, their eyes often hidden beneath their hoods. I imagine her walking silently beside me, staring at the ocean, picking up a stone—how can we take moments like this, Martha, and make a plea on behalf of the earth?