"Blue Iris" by Mary Oliver

There is a struggle in Mary Oliver's poems. Even in the poems beyond her book Blue Iris. Within her poems are dual worlds which the narrator straddles and contemplates. One world is that of ambition and the other seems to be the sanctuary of nature. Ambition concerns money, fame, success, and the daily-grind. Nature concerns an inner-knowing, peace, and appreciation. Here is an excerpt from her poem "Black Oaks" that embodies the struggle between ambition and nature.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another--why don't you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money.
I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

We are living in a time where idleness is the enemy and ambition is the force. In her poems, Oliver wants to choose idleness and encourages sleeping in the grasses and lounging near the river. Her poems make me think about Rachel Carson's essay "The Sense of Wonder", about how we need to encourage children to be curious about nature so that we, as adults, can learn something from these children.

A poem by Mary Oliver is very easy to recognize when looking down at the page. Her poems trickle down the page like formed raindrops, in stanzas where all the words seem to count. When reading these poems to myself, I realize that the form and line breaks of these poems makes me really want to hear these poems be read aloud. In my desperation to hear a Mary Oliver poem be read aloud, I went to youtube and found this video of a woman reciting "Wild Geese" while waiting in the car for her husband while he was at a doctor's appointment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqmQ829qYRc

Her poems make me, as a human being living in this world, feel delicate. Like I am in touch with the soft animal of myself. That I should allow this body to to crawl into whatever hole or nook that it desires. And lately, to be honest, I have been allowing this.

At the Entrance to the Cave

I am
a soft stone, sitting
and waiting for the moss'
green down to spread across

my back. The cave breathes
come in. The spiders spell
home with silk ink
that stretches above my head

like the black, slick roof
between two streets
where my mother waits to greet
this body. This shiny skin.