(Congratulations! And in honor, here a gradeschool watercolor of his:)
(My favorites: lightning *nearly* striking church; transparent doors and windowframes; TV antennae on houses; German patchwork fields.)
Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,
what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so
utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment
by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,
as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.
[This is another poem by Mary Oliver, from Red Bird. I read it twice before I realized the "she" is actually sorrow -- I thought it was about loving someone who is difficult to love and needs care, like a sick child or a sick person who is like a child. (Which of course, is in one way exactly what it is about even though it's about sorrow.) I like it a lot as a poem because sadness so often has to do with stories ending, with not feeling like there is anywhere to go from here. And telling a story about yourself with sorrow as a character is an ingenious way to re-start time, and to re-start a sense that it is worth paying gentle attention to your own life.]
I have been saving a small stack of library books for several months (you can do this with academic libraries) because I was wanting to type up passages from them. One of the books is Mary Oliver’s Red Bird, and here is one poem from it.
OCEAN
I am in love with the Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is
always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each one of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.
Last December during finals while I wrote papers somewhat deliriously, I was deeply (and repeatedly) entertained by this line of Simone Weil’s, from an essay in the collection Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks:
“Many things in mythology are clarified if one admits the assumption that all that relates to the moon, to horns (because they are images of the moon) and to vegetable sap symbolizes the Word.”
Long live your cryptic, unqualifiedly absolute statements, Simone Weil.
