An Inflorescence (A Regular Series of Poems Every Friday) Cockeyed Optimist - Mary Oliver

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.



American poet Mary Oliver (b. 1935) has been a published poet since the 1960s. She and her partner Molly Malone Cook are longtime residents of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Cook died in 2005. I think of her poems as a quiet place in the bustling world to stop and listen. Their diction is straightforward, their tone tends to be optimistic and meditative, their subject is usually the natural world, their sound like the regular trod of a boot on a soft ground of pine - you hardly hear the footfall, some crackles of needles and twigs, but when you look back its step has made an imprint. I own three of her books, two volumes of poems Dream Work and Why I Wake Early, and A Poetry Handbook - which talks about the elements of poems and how they are put together. Here is a link to her books, some of her poems, and here is my selection for today's inflorescence.


An Afternoon in the Stacks

Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside.  It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages.  An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me.  From in here, the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open.  When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library.  But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.

Knife

Something
just now
moved through my heart
like the thinnest of blades
as that red-tail pumped
once with its great wings
and flew above the gray, cracked
rock wall.
It wasn't
about the bird, it was
something about the way
stone stays
mute and put, whatever
goes flashing by.
Sometimes,
when I sit like this, quiet,
all the dreams of my blood
and all outrageous divisions of time
seem ready to leave,
to slide out of me.
Then, I imagine, I would never move.
By now
the hawk has flown five miles
at least,
dazzling whoever else has happened
to look up.
I was dazzled. But that
wasn't the knife.
It was the sheer, dense wall
of blind stone
without a pinch of hope
or a single unfulfilled desire
sponging up and reflecting,
so brilliantly,
as it has for centuries,
the sun's fire.

Honey at the Table

It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table

and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,

grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until

deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,

you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees - - - a taste
composed of everything lost,in which everything lost is found.

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. 

The Fire

That winter it seemed the city
was always burning - night after night
the flames leaped, the ladders pitched forward.
Scorched but alive, the homeless wailed
as they ran for the cold streets.
That winter my mind had turned around,
shedding, like leaves, its bolts of information -
drilling down, through history,
toward my motionless heart.
Those days I was willing, but frightened.
What I mean is, I wanted to live my life
but I didn't want to do what I had to do
to go on, which was: to go back.
All winter the fires kept burning,
the smoke swirled, the flames grew hotter.
I began to curse, to stumble and choke.
Everything, solemnly, drove me toward it -
the crying out, that's so hard to do.
Then over my head the red timbers floated,
my feet were slippers of fire, my voice
crashed at the truth, my fists
smashed at the flames to find the door -
wicked and sad, mortal and bearable,
it fell open forever as I burned.

Sunrise

You can
die for it -
an idea,
or the world.  People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound

to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light.  but

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of china,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us?  Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose, that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what I means.  I think this as I am crossing
from one field to another, in summer, and the
mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either
knows enough already or knows enough to be
perfectly content not knowing.  Song being born
of quest he knows this: he must turn silent
were he suddenly assaulted with answers.  Instead

oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly
unanswered.  At my feet the white-petaled daisies display
the small suns of their center-piece - their, if you don't
mind my saying so - their hearts.  Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots.  What do I know.
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun
lights up willingly; for example - I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field.