Sedona -- Pull over

I haven’t posted any poems lately, so let’s read some Mary Oliver. With it are some pictures of a scene that required me to pull the car over and capture the morning sky near Sedona, Arizona. Then I had to find a path and walk down to river that carved out the valley, and enjoy some tree tops and bottoms. And watch the trees and rocks dancing together.

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.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, 2004

If you’d like to hear Mary Oliver reading this poem, click here.

And if you want to see wild geese — scroll down.

Winter at Jökulsárlón

About ten minutes from where we stayed on Iceland’s south coast is one of the country’s wonders. A tongue of the massive Vatnajökull glacier flows into Jökulsárlón Glacier Bay where icebergs break off and flow on Iceland’s shortest river into the Atlantic. Then waves break the bergs even more, and incoming tides push the broken ice unto the black sand, giving the place its name—Diamond Beach. Unfortunately, for our visit, no ice flowed back to the beach. Nonetheless, the mountains, glacier, bay, and beach were still wondrously beautiful.

Jökulsárlón Bay, Iceland

As we sat at the edge of the water, a school of fish fluttered and jumped in front of us, and soon seals were feeding. Far across the Atlantic, past Greenland, on Cape Cod, Mary Oliver watched seals and wrote a poem of memory.

Winter at Herring Cove

Years ago,

on the bottle-green light

of the cold January sea,

Breaker on Bagh Steinigidh

two seals

suddenly appeared together

in a single uplifting wave—

Seal on Jökulsárlón

each in exactly the same relaxed position—

each, like a large, black comma,

upright and staring;

it was like a painting

done twice

and, twice, tenderly.

Sunset seal

The wave hung, then it broke apart;

its lip was lightning;

its floor was the blow of sand

over which the seals rose and twirled and were gone.

Of all the reasons for gladness,

what could be foremost of this one,

Dawn Jökulsárlón beach

that the mind can seize both the instant and the memory!

Now the seals are no more than the salt of the sea.

If they live, they’re more distant than Greenland.

Over Greenland

But here’s the kingdom we call remembrance

with its thousand iron doors

through which I pass so easily,

Loch Ba golden ice

switching on the old lights as I go—

while the dead wind rises and the old rapture rewinds,

the stiff waters once more begin to kick and flow.

Herring Cove, Mary Oliver from What Do We Know? 2002

Dawn on Diamond Beach, Jökulsárlón, Iceland

Revisits: "We shall not cease from exploration"

Last week we travelled to St. Louis: a revisit to a favorite city. And the trip included meeting my friend who introduced me to St. Louis when we were in college. She mentioned that each semester she still teaches The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I studied that poem by St. Louis-born T. S. Eliot while in college, and so now needed to go back and revisit the poem.

Evening, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table:

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Profrock 1917

That’s how this weird, wonderful poem begins. My anthology perfectly describes that opening:

“With the third line of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ the romantic mood set by the opening couplet collapses, and modern poetry begins.” The Oxford Book of American Poetry.

Snow Geese, Bosque del Apache

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Profrock 1917

The images are from a favorite place I revisited last November: Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in southwest New Mexico. Thousands of Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese revisit and gather there along the Rio Grande for much of the winter.

Sandhill Crane sunset, Bosque del Apache

Eliot wrote Prufrock during World War I. He moved to England and wrote Little Gidding in 1942 during the terror and uncertainty of the next World War.

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

Bald Eagle, Bosque del Apache, New Mexico

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding 1942

Sandhill Crane family, Bosque del Apache sunrise