[New Year’s Eve, poems by Mary Oliver and Jane Mead]
“Are spirits’ lives so short?” asked Scrooge.
“My life upon this globe is very brief,” replied the Ghost. “It ends to-night.”
The worm Ouroboros eats its tail, every day renewed, ever renewing. Cycles unending. The Neuse River snakes to New Bern, clouds lift inland, each little feeder stream is filled. Rain, ice, lichen eat the stone, phosphate creeps its migration through generations: rock to soil, leaf to masticator, herbivore to predator and all decomposing back to soil. I breathe out what the tree breathes in and breathes out for me to breathe. And the cycle we mark today: the dying Year gives birth to the New.
So many cycles. One enormous round. Every thing connected, interconnected, and we sense ourselves as spokes of the wheel or sometimes the never-ceasing motion of its rim that grinds along the path that is our life. As daylight diminishes it grows harder to hold onto our imagining of that wheel, its endless turning, that path it pursues still stretching on beyond the horizon. Harder to hold onto hope that the path’s end is indeterminate and out of sight.
Yes, it grows harder in these years of death’s overwhelming harvest to push aside imagining our own death. Too many deaths, COVID and otherwise, to pay attention; too many deaths to ignore a single one. In a few minutes I’ll set this page aside when my son arrives. He’ll leave Amelia here while the rest of the family attends their next-door neighbor’s funeral. A sudden death – our friend M was not old or ill. A shock to the fragile wall we build around our own mortality. Linda and I find ourselves tallying all the deaths that have touched us this month. The man who fixes our cars. A friend’s best friend. Names and faces more than we ever expect, doesn’t it seem? Death hunches at our shoulder, sometimes intrusive, sometimes silently lingering, sometimes perched like a moth that’s invisible until it flies into our face.
Tonight at midnight we will celebrate the Newborn Year but perhaps with even more enthusiasm we’ll celebrate a moment’s permission to ignore its haggard, dissipated forebear. The Old Year dies in winter darkness; death, the ultimate consuming dark. But notice – twelve days enfold the span of solstice to new year’s morning. The Ghost of Christmas Present senescent and dying yet retains some presence within us. Twelve days already lengthening, light seeping in even before the old year succumbs. Perhaps endings and beginnings are false markings along the ever-flowing course. Perhaps encircled by death it is possible, vital even, to engage with life. Perhaps death itself is not darkness but enfolding light.
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow —
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows —
so I thought:
maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —
as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.
Mary Oliver — 1935-2019
this poem first appeared in The New Yorker, January 2, 1989
I Wonder if I Will Miss the Moss
I wonder if I will miss the moss
after I fly off as much as I miss it now
just thinking about leaving.
There were stones of many colors.
There were sticks holding both
lichen and moss.
There were red gates with old
hand-forged hardware.
There were fields of dry grass
smelling of first rain
then of new mud. There was mud,
and there was the walking,
all the beautiful walking,
and it alone filled me –
the smells, the scratchy grass heads.
All the sleeping under bushes,
once waking to vultures above, peering down
with their bent heads they way they do,
caricatures of interest and curiosity.
Once too a lizard.
Once too a kangaroo rat.
Once too a rat.
They did not say I belonged to them,
but I did.
Whenever the experiment on and of
my life begins to draw to a close
I’ll go back to the place that held me
and be held. It’s O.K. I think
I did what I could. I think
I sang some, I think I held my hand out.
Jane Mead — 1958-2019
this poem first appeared in The New Yorker, September 20, 2021
. . . . . . .
Mary Oliver was a guide to the intersection between human life and the natural world; her voice affirms the expression of person in nature in person and affirms that no voice can fully express that oneness. Jane Mead, who for years was Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, expected poetry to move people to preserve the earth; at the end of her life she was a guide to the landscape and ecology of dying.
. . . . . . .
Thank you! and cheers chasing the light!
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Thanks and peace to you, Jenny. Maybe someday I’ll know to quit chasing and discover the light all around and within. —B
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Loved the images in your essay and the poems. Light pulling us in. Very comforting
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Thanks, Nancy and Mike. Don’t we have our minds full of the mortality of our parents/sibs much less our own. Poetry helps. I suspect Dick and Carol will indeed miss the moss but perhaps can have some comfort in knowing they have often held out their hands, to give more often than to receive. —B
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For Christmas a friend gave us Christian Wiman’s HE HELD RADICAL LIGHT — I’m inspired daily as I read through it (it also is perfect for a poetry geek, contains a number of poems I’ve treasured plus new ones to treasure, including the Mary Oliver from today’s post). —B
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Bill, your essay speaks truly and eloquently to me, especially as we endure another year of grimness and grace. May we continue to see the beauty and precariousness every day.
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Thanks so much, Debra. When our granddaughter arrived on Wednesday morning she was crying, maybe because she had to leave her Mom. Unusual for her although she is sensitive as any six-year old. By lunch she was smiling and we shared plenty of giggles and laughs before we took her home for supper. I can’t deny my heart’s burden at her tears but I hold onto her joy. We share it all — that is the greatest joy. —B
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“Perhaps death itself is not darkness but enfolding light” – a perfect ending, that invites a new beginning, to your meditative essay. Thank you, Bill, for the poems and the light.
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We will wander into the new year looking for moments of light and as we seek we can’t fail to find. —B
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Thank you for these words… perfect on this grey and thankfully wet morning. Darkness can keep us from collapsing under the weight of pure brilliance!
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Whether thankful for sun when it’s been raining or for rain after it’s long absence, let me be thankful for change, the essence of being. —B
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Yes, thanks Bill and those who have commented. You’ve caused my life to pause for a few minutes, just as when I read a new poem or re-read a known favorite. In that pause I looked out the window to find my yard looking today, much like yesterday, except for the rain, a hydrangea that needs a pruning, a vibrant holly and a bare dogwood just biding it’s time before its spring bloom.
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Thanks Bill — an image of the moment. We don’t need more minutes but more moments. —B
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