mary oliver

Mary Oliver died yesterday. 83 years old. She is a pulitzer prize winning poet, a writer who believed in mostly staying private and allowing the work to speak for her. Her work is largely nature-based, but cutthroat. Oliver loved taking walks and eventually hid pencils in the trees for herself among them, so she would never be without one should inspiration strike. Her work is something that starts on the outside and works inward. Oliver's words have stung and stuck me for a long, long time.



Do musicians feel this way about one another when one of their own pass away? Do steel workers, acrobats, dancers, taxi drivers? Mary Oliver was one of us, a poet. Is this why the news is hitting so hard, sticking a bit more solid? I'm not sure. But her death feels like something heavy that I am carrying now.

When Death Comes
Mary Oliver

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