r-eating: Oliver, happiness, bees

When I want to read something that lulls me back into hive-mind, some song of trees and deer and birds, it's to Mary Oliver that I always turn.  I had a period, starting in 2009, where I read a poem of hers every morning --  a special diet, probably the only kind of sustained meditation I'm capable of, sitting quietly with some words.  I'd set myself down in a special spot reserved only for this reading, perched on a yoga block in front of a window onto the garden and allow myself just one poem a morning.  In this way I made my way through several books of poems, first Why I Wake Early, then Dream Work, then Blue Iris. Oh, and House of Light.  I'd been wondering how to add poetry to my day, how to make my way through the books I'd bought.  It didn't seem right to just sit in a chair and plow through them, one after another, taking them in willy-nilly, pigging out on them.  I wanted, instead, that sensation of allowing myself just one a day, one little tasty truffle.

As I'm writing this I'm realizing how often for me reading draws on the same vocabulary as eating.  And how much I do love both.  When a book is particularly delicious, I don't just read: I devour.  I eat stories, gobble them up. I find them tasty.  They are delicious.  

Reading for me is a physical process of ingestion: in through the eyes.

I am tempted to say I should probably be doing a lot more of the r-eating right now, as opposed to the eating, since in my injured under-exercising state, I'm developing a big ass, but let's keep things positive, shall we? 

I think I've come across people who find Oliver's poetry facile, who would prefer a more complicated, stormy drama in their poetry (or something, I'm not sure what they're looking for).  What you like, you like; what you don't, you don't.  All I know is that I am truly perfectly content, more than happy in fact, with what and how she writes.  She always captures that feeling I get when I am wandering in the woods and watching, waiting as it all unfolds around me, keeping still when a twig naps so as not to break the spell.  When I read her, I'm there, reverent.  She has a direct line on that particular exhaltation, something I recognized as my own from the very first time I heard these words read aloud, at the end of a yoga class:

  This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready

    to break my heart

      as the sun rises

  ...

  Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,

    and softly,

      and exclaiming of their dearness,

        fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

  with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling.

    their eagerness

      to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are

        nothing, forever?

                                            - exerpt from "Peonies," in the collection Blue Iris (2004).

That IS me, outside, bed-headed and barefoot, especially now that it's April and it's all beginning, again, all this wild and perfect before it too is nothing, forever. Every poem unfolds for me this way -- the words take me to that cherished place where I am in love with the natural world of which we are so lucky to be a part.  Who needs god, really, who needs religion?  Not me, not when I can see what lives around me, not when I can read these words, the start of the 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.

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

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Oh, how many times have those words caught me -- "let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves."  Honey in the mouth, to be savored!

Coming home from work yesterday, still in my lullabied hive-y state -- testament to how strong that feeling was, that it survived a day of work -- I went looking for more, for what Mary Oliver on bees.  And since I signed on for NaBloPoMo again -- short for National Blog Post Month  -- and the prompt is POEM, it seemed fitting.  Here, from American Primitive is "Happiness." 

In the afternoon I watched
the she-bear; she was looking
for the secret bin of sweetness -
honey, that the bees store
in the trees' soft caves
Black block of gloom, she climbed down
tree after tree and shuffled on
through the woods.  And then
she found it!  The honey-house deep
as heartwood, and dipped into it
among the swarming bees -- honey and comb
she lipped and tongued and scooped out
in her black nails, until

maybe she grew full, or sleepy, or maybe
a little drunk, and sticky
down the rugs of her arms,
and began to hum and sway.
I saw her let go of the branches,
I saw her lift her honeyed muzzle
into the leaves, and her thick arms
as though she would fly --
an enormous bee
all sweetness and wings --
down into the meadows, the perfection
of honeysuckle and roses and clover --
to float and sleep in the sheer nets
swaying from flower to flower
day after shining day.

Let's be that, shall we?  Let's go from black block of gloom to enormous bee, sticky down the rugs of her arms, as though she would fly, float and sleep in the sheer nets swaying from flower to flower day after shining day.

Day after shining day. Delicious.

XX