A Walk with Mary Oliver

Hello friends. The poetry of Mary Oliver has been a constant literary companion. Her work is a reminder that God is not some far-away being approachable only by prayer, but that nature itself is a manifestation of wholeness. A walk up the driveway to retrieve the paper, the refilling of a birdfeeder, seeing that Cat Tony has water in his dish, are all part of the “concert in the cosmic music hall,” as I once described it. My daily tasks are the little things that make the world whole. Best, Gene

 

A Walk with Mary Oliver

I want to make poems that look into the earth
and the heavens and see the unseeable.
(Mary Oliver, “Everything”)

I like her face, its humility and brilliance,
at least as much as her poetry,
that draws me to her and scares me away.

I’ve already lived five years longer than she
without her fame and her genius with words,
but I’m tumbling into stray paths of quibbling.

She would prefer that I stop this,
and walk the streets and hills of my journey,
the heaven and earth inherited by a welder’s son

in Oakland who became a Jesuit, but lived distant
from a mother’s geranium garden, a nonna’s
annual fava bean plantings and nonno’s veggie lots.

Even the lovely grape vines of Los Gatos
became unimportant background to a clerical
education in liberal arts and rules of obedience.

Evolutionary thinking and climate crisis gradually
inclined philosophers and poets to develop
a spirituality of cosmic life immersed in the divine.

So Mary Oliver takes me by the hand to feel God
in the soft eye and foot of deer, in wild
bird song and in the simple splendor of bees,

in the loon’s final hymn, in sunflowers
turning golden while circling with the sun,
and in the final purr and kiss of my cat Max