Morning Walks & Mary Oliver

If you're in Kansas right now, you know what sort of day today is: it feels more like early March than mid-May. It's all bluster and chill and gray, spitting rain. I could have picked better weather for my first day of work, but this bleariness had to do! (My first day went swimmingly, by the way!)

But despite how damn cold my arms were as I walked to work this morning, I was gloriously happy to be outside walking in Lawrence. I love this town with its old, bright houses, its soft grasses crowding up between brick-paved sidewalks, its many trees thick and green and writhing in the wind.

I've missed walking, too. I've always been a bit of a peripatetic, maybe not in the philosophical sense but in the sense that I love walking and thinking and, when I can convince someone to come with me, walking while I talk. It made me brilliantly happy this morning to hoof my way up "Mount" Oread. I saw pale lilacs and wet stones and robins dark-feathered with rain. Walking makes me mindful of the world, and I miss that when I spend too much time in a car.

This morning got me thinking about Mary Oliver, who I got to see read last week on KU's campus. I've always liked her poetry (especially American Primitive, which is one of my favorite books), but the clarity and peacefulness and passion of her poems is even more apparent when she's reading them aloud. Her poems feel like blessings, somehow, in the same way that What Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Marilyn Robinson's Gilead do: they're not religious works, per se, but they are works of careful attention and love and praise.

I've posted Oliver's "Peonies" below. It's one of her most famous poems, and it's one that she almost always performs at readings. It's a beautiful poem, full of death as well as life, as so many of her poems are. And I absolutely love that, in the midst of all her rich, sensuous specificity, she's ballsy enough to ask "Do you love this world? / Do you cherish your humble and silky life? / Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?" She's not afraid to ask the big questions or to say just what she means, and that's what makes her so damn good.

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Peonies

By Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises, 
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open ---
pools of lace, 
white and pink ---
and all day the black ants climb over them, 

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls, 
craving the sweet sap, 
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities ---
and all day
under the shifty wind, 
as in a dance to the great wedding, 

the flowers bend their bright bodies, 
and tip their fragrance to the air, 
and rise, 
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness 
gladly and lightly, 
and there it is again --- 
beauty the brave, the exemplary, 

blazing open. 
Do you love this world? 
Do you cherish your humble and silky life? 
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? 

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, 
and softly, 
and exclaiming of their dearness, 
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, 

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, 
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?