I first discovered the poet Mary Oliver, in Terry Tempest
Williams' Refuge: An Unnatural
History of Family and Place. In Williams’
introduction to the book, she used the first five lines from Oliver’s poem, “Wild
Geese”:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it
loves.”
For someone, especially female, raised a strict Catholic in
the 1950s, those words struck a chord, affirming what I’d felt as I grew to
adulthood: That I was body as well as soul, a “soft animal” alive in, and with,
the natural world.
Eventually Oliver’s words—almost a command—would release me
from the worst of the religious dogma I’d been forced to accept.
But what liberates also constrains.
The body, unlike the soul, which I translate as spirit,
diminishes and dies. (And, if we’re lucky, over many decades of living and loving.)
But Oliver never shrank from this awareness either, and so
her poetry invites us to “love what it loves” by paying attention to the world
we live in. Just as she did with a grasshopper she encountered out walking through nearby fields.
She describes and reflects on this small moment in her poem The
Summer Day,” ending with these lines:
“Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?”
As for Oliver’s own precious life, it ended last month, at
her home in Florida, at age 83. And having spent her life observing and describing
her experiences in both the human and natural world, she was ever mindful of
death, including her own.
Here are the final three stanzas of her poem, “When Death Comes,”
written in 2006:
“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.”
