Very lovely, Clive. I enjoyed the poem and your careful, caring reading of it. It brought to mind the extensive
collection of illuminated manuscripts at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. I spent an afternoon there admiring them and would gladly return to do so again; they are spectacular and exquisitely displayed. And then there’s the Getty’s gardens…
The poem that follows in your essay, “Old People”, reminded me of this poem by Mary Oliver that I have been wanting to post. I suppose Mary Oliver could be easy to make fun of or even to burlesque, but amidst the lulling pages of innocuous descriptions of nature, she suddenly douses you with the cold and clear water of wisdom, or even call it truth, such as at the close of this poem, “In Blackwater Woods”. It is a bracing contrast, and that is why I read her.
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
Everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
-- Mary Oliver