Mary Oliver Response

“Of course nothing stops the cold, black, curved blade from hooking forward – of course loss is the great lesson.”

- Poppies

The Wild
(a short unrevised poem in reaction to Blue Iris)

It’s amazing how much of yourself
can be found curled up, sound asleep
in the warm sheets of a small paperback book.
I woke up face down in the margin,
a trickling stream of drool running like a sentence
into a paragraph on the ocean…
or a poem about Sea Leaves.
When I opened my eyes I wasn’t sure
if I’d actually been asleep,
dreaming about being on vacation
in the Appalachian Highlands;
or if I was hard at work,
grinding my teeth into the book’s spine
like a curious raccoon on an empty stomach
looking for a camper’s scraps
hungry for whatever comes next.

Mary Oliver was “at the bravo age of sixteen” when she spent a summer embracing nature near the river in Clarion, Pennsylvania, less than thirty minutes southeast of my high school, down route 322, past the buffalo, standing still as a mountain at Hirsh’s Meats in Kossuth. In her short essay, A Blessing, Oliver tells us about living in a tent, hiking, eating potatoes, discovering strip mines, listening to owls and learning to write. Her essays, much like her poems, are as much about exploring what it means to be alive as they are about exploring the natural world. The plants and flowers she describes are a frame or a lens with which she often finds a deeper understanding of her relationship with the environment (both immediate and existential). Her poem Touch-me-nots reads:

And then I too, knowing the world,
ran through the jewel weeds
as someone, unknown and not smiling,
came down the path to where

the trap lay, stamped upon
by my very own feet,
and while I ran, the touch-me-nots
nodded affirmatively

their golden bodies –
I could not help but touch them –
and dashed forth their sleek pods,
oh, life flew around us, everywhere.

As much as I appreciate this aspect of her work, I am even more fond of the personal memories she reminded me of when she brought up this place, near Clarion, so close to one of my homes.

I was fourteen, maybe the carnival age, and I was probably a clown riding horseback with a girl at Deer Meadow Campground in Cook Forest, Pennsylvania where my parents, brothers and my sister with some family friends pitched tents in the summer of 1988. We ate camper pies cooked over the metal ring of a fire pit, listened to a David Crosby look-a-like sing American Pie, went trout fishing in a nearby stream, and I even remember drawing a comic book inspired by the Punisher (what the significance of that is, I don’t really know). I do know that there was a girl in the campground arcade who asked me to go horseback riding, and I went. And probably for the first time in my life, I didn’t mind leaving a video game behind.

It was 1988 and I was barely born, but I was absolutely alive. We had a wonderful time at Deer Meadow campground – water, electric and cable (only 27 dollars today). I don’t remember seeing any skunks, certainly none sleeping in my cot. But I do remember riding that horse, watching a girl from Emporium ride in front of me. And I remember the song The Flame playing on the radio that summer, as corny as it was, as corny as I was, and as close to nature as I will probably ever be. Thank you, Mary Oliver, thank you.