Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

structureandstyle:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

—Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is a notoriously private poet, which is reflected in her often-upbeat poetry. She said of “The Journey” in an O Magazine interview with Maria Schriver: ”I’m shocked to see that I wrote that. Because I was always very private about my life, and yet the poems in Dream Work [1986] are not so private as I thought.” I, for one, am so thankful this poem came out of her despite herself, despite her privacy.

If ever you are hurting, read this poem. Save “the only life you could save.” Save yourself.

-R

structureandstyle:

Thinking we were safe — insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom…
…And who does not know that pair of shutters
With the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests — just guests of one another’s senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit….
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
— If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

—Rosemary Tonks

This poem seems so ordinary, so in touch with everyday language. And yet it’s definitely a poem and would be so identifiable even if it were a prose poem. Mary Oliver remarks in A Poetry Handbook, “Every poem contains within itself an essential difference from ordinary language, no matter how similar to conversational language it may seem at first to be. Call it formality, compression, originality, imagination—whatever it is, it is essential…the space between daily language and literature is neither terribly deep nor wide, but it does contain a vital difference—of intent and intensity.” Another creative writing handbook calls this “density.” Whatever it is, I’m haunted by the “conversational” language of this poem and its subject matter.

“To make love as well as that is ruinous.” Such a simple, true line in such a simple, thoughtful poem.

-R

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver