"There you go"

I got a note from my cousin, Brenda. She and her grandchildren were doing a butterfly project. When they were ready to release them they noticed one had  deformed wings so they gave her an extra week before they let her go.  When they did release her she struggled to get about 12 feet off the ground and a bird swooped down and got her in midair. "There you go," was Brenda's response.  It reminded me of this poem in which Mary Oliver recognizes the beauty and the irony in the harsh reality of nature, yet she is conflicted by it. There is a certain inevitability that all aspects of life end up in death or loss, or I am missing the more positive message?

Night and the River

Mary Oliver

I have seen the great feet

leaping into the river

and I have seen moonlight

milky along the long muzzle

and I have seen the body

of something scaled and wonderful

slumped in the sudden fire of it mouth,

and I could not tell which fit me

more comfortably, the power,

or the powerlessness:

neither would have me

entirely; I was divided,

consumed, by sympathy,

pity, admiration.

After a while it was done,

the fish had vanished, the bear

lumped away

to the green shore

and into the trees. And then there was only

this story.

It followed me home

and entered my house-

a difficult guest

with a single tune

which it hums all day and through the night-

slowly, or briskly,

it doesn't matter,

it sounds like a river leaping and falling; it sounds like a body

falling apart

Alone

The Sound of One Fork

Minnie Pratt
 

Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof

and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree

as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone

in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning,

that waits like the lobed sassafras leaf just before

its dark green turns into red, that waits

like the honeybee in the mouth of the purple lobelia.

While I wait, I can hear the random clink of one fork

against a plate. The woman next door is eating supper

alone. She is sixty, perhaps, and for many years

has eaten by herself the tomatoes, the corn

and okra that she grows in her backyard garden.

Her small metallic sound persists, as quiet almost

as the windless silence, persists like the steady

random click of a redbird cracking a few

more seeds before the sun gets too low.

She does not hurry, she does not linger.

Her younger neighbors think that she is lonely.

But I know what sufficiency she may possess.

I know what can be gathered from year to year,

gathered from what is near to hand, as I do

elderberries that bend in damp thickets by the road,

gathered and preserved, jars and jars shining

in rows of claret red, made at times with help,

a friend or a lover, but consumed long after,

long after they are gone and I sit

alone at the kitchen table.

And when I sit in the last heat of Sunday, afternoons

on the porch steps in the acid breath of the boxwoods,

I also know desolation. The week is over, the coming night

will not lift. I am exhausted from making each day.

My family, my children live in other states,

the women I love in other towns. I would rather be here

than with them in the old ways, but when all that’s left

of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds,

when I get up and come in to fix supper,

in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them.

In the morning and the evening we are by ourselves,

the woman next door and I. Still, we persist.

I open the drawer to get out the silverware.

She goes to her garden to pull weeds and pick

the crookneck squash that turn yellow with late summer.

I walk down to the pond in the morning to watch

and wait for the blue heron who comes at first light

to feed on minnows that swim through her shadow in the water.

She stays until the day grows so bright

that she cannot endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied.

She bows her wings and slowly lifts into flight,

grey and slate blue against a paler sky.

I know she will come back. I see the light create

a russet curve of land on the farther bank,

where the wild rice bends heavy and ripe

under the first blackbirds. I know

she will come back. I see the light curve

in the fall and rise of her wing.

Minnie Bruce Pratt, “The Sound of One Fork” from The Dirt She Ate: New and Selected Poems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Copyright © 2003 by Minnie Bruce Pratt.

I find this poem soothing somehow, even though it deals with loneliness, a topic I am not very comfortable with.

monet

Monet Refuses the Operation

 – Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say that there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

This poem offers encouragement and confirmation to those who are able to see the world differently.  The world owes so much to the artists and writers who give us hope with their vision and alternative take on things. I've included a some of Monet's art that Mueller describes so beautifully.