An Elegy for Mary Oliver

An Elegy forMary Oliver

BY KRISTINA AVRAMOVIC OLDANI

Of all the souls to put pen to paper and sing the wonders of this world, none has captured my imagination and heart as completely as Mary Oliver.

Mary’s “verbs of muscle” and “adjectives of exactitude,” paired with her courageous openness and keen curiosity gave me new language for my deeply felt connection with the natural world as well as a new definition of and relationship to the idea of God.

Mary’s brilliance emerged from that curious crucible of becoming—a difficult childhood. In her essay “Staying Alive,” which jumps between scenes of a harried fox and her experience of growing up, she writes:

"Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.

"I quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place."

Mary’s gift to the world was the fact that her chosen pathways of escape were, all along, not of the variety that took her further from herself, but rather led her further in. An intuition honed from a young age recognized that in presence, not escapism, solace—and even joy—was to be found.

Her knack for presence, when coupled with the discovery that “attention without feeling…is only a report,” produced this radiant soul and penned these earnest lines:

"I look; morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open."

Mary’s way of being in the world, her insistence on daily witnessing with each sense sharply attuned “something that more or less kills me with delight,” gifted us volume after volume on lilies, bear, spider webs, deer, grasshoppers, geese, fox, horses, shells, and myriad other natural wonders, each treated with the same breathless, nearly-but-not-quite ineffable wonder:

"It is what I was born for— to look, to listen,

to lose myself inside this soft world— to instruct myself over and over in joy […] Oh, good scholar,

I say to myself, how can you help

but grow wise with teachings such as these"

Her insistence on naming what she could, and thereupon deferring honor—

"one more sweet-as-honey answer for the wanderer whose tongue is agile, whose mind, in the world’s riotous plenty,

wants syntax, connections, lists, and most of all names to set beside the multitudinous stars, flowers, sea creatures, rocks, trees."

—was matched by an equal willingness to leave unnamed and forever unknown life’s mysteries:

"Understand, I am always trying to figure out what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape— […] I believe I will never quite know. Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale pink morning light."

In Mary, I’ve found a shining example of what it means to live into rather than shrink from the unknowable, to continually and relentlessly cultivate openness, to recognize every instinct to curl around the softness of myself as opportunity to open my arms wider and wider to the world, and to carefully and insistently exercise my wonder. Through her poetry, she’s given me a glimpse of a simple but rich experience of life, replete with everyday moments of enchantment:

"and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees."

In death, I imagine Mary’s spirit free at last to bound on all fours, slither, or take flight, deepening the kinship she felt with all spirits in life without the encumberment of a human form. I imagine her leaving her body to commune with the deer, who no longer “leap away, leaving me there alone,” joining them to travel “over the hills and over the hills and into the impossible trees.” I imagine her soul in the clutches of the owl she once encountered, with whom she could not then confer as she so longed:

"aloft in the air, under his great wings, shouting praise, praise, praise" •