One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, passed away yesterday. She was 83.
How quickly we turn one page to the next, and yet so much undone.
I want her to not be dead.
Just like I wanted my mom to not be dead.
There are people I am not ready to lose,
Even if they are ready to leave.
Some lonely place in me got jarred by the news. That place that has no real measure, cannot quite be found except in the pulsing of my blood and the intuitive sense just beneath my skin.
Like a blinding flash of some deep buried truth – visible for not long enough to define – then buried once again.
Such is life.
The coming into clarity and then a slipping back to the every day.
The laundry.
The dishes.
The lists.
As if that were to give some meaning to this form and this breath.
damn.
Some things really do knock me of my game.
Morning in a New Land
In trees still dripping night some nameless birds
Woke, shook out their arrowy wings, and sang,
Slowly, like finches sifting through a dream.
The pink sun fell, like glass, into the fields.
Two chestnuts, and a dapple gray,
Their shoulders wet with light, their dark hair streaming,
Climbed the hill. The last mist fell away,
And under the trees, beyond time’s brittle drift,
I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.
Catharine Cooper 