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If I envy anyone it must be
My grandmother in a long ago
Green summer, who hurried
Between kitchen and orchard on small
Uneducated feet, and took easily
All shining fruits into her eager hands.

That summer I hurried too, wakened
To books and music and circling philosophies.
I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers
That could not solve the mystery of the trees.

My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career.
So to please her I studied-but I will remember always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year.

The River Styx, Ohio

We drove through October, Grandmother pointing at cows;
Mother, bifocaled, squinting at maps for a crossroad.
We came instead to the River Styx, Ohio.

Dead leaves fell ruffling like an ugly lace
Down the brown hillsides, past some empty buildings.
We left the car and wandered through a field,
Three ladies pausing in indifferent space.

Some cows drank from a creek, and lurched away.
Whoever named the place learned the hard lesson,
I'd guess, without much fanfare or delay.
Farms to both sides shook, bankrupt, in the wind.

We hope for magic; mystery endures.
We look for freedom, but the measure's set.
There was a graveyard, but we saw no people.
We went back to the car.

Dim with arthritis, time, the muddied seasons,
Grandmother poised in the back seat again,
Counting the cows. My mother's tightening fingers
Scratched at the roads that would take us home. On the wheel
I tensed my knuckles, felt the first stab of pain.

No Voyage

I wake earlier, now that the birds have come
And sing in the unfailing trees.
On a cot by an open window
I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds.

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

For myself, I find my wanting life
Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance:
Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts,
Who still am citizen of this fallen city?

On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember
While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time.
Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can
Inherit from disaster before I move.

O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.

biography

born Sept. 10, 1935, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.

American poet whose work reflects a deep communion with the natural world.

Oliver attended Ohio State University and Vassar College but did not earn a degree. She worked for a time as a secretary for the sister of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay’s influence is apparent in Oliver’s first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems (1963). These lyrical nature poems are set in a variety of locales, especially the Ohio of Oliver’s youth. Her childhood plays a more central role in The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems (1972), in which she attempted to re-create the past through memory and myth. The Night Traveler (1978) explores the themes of birth, decay, and death through the conceit of a journey into the underworld of classical mythology. In these poems Oliver’s fluent imagery weaves together the worlds of humans, animals, and plants.

Reluctant to sit for interviews, Mary Oliver prefers to be known through her work, which in the end best defines her as an individual as well as a poet. Choosing to deflect interest in herself as a personality, the writer seems happy simply to dissolve into her poetry.

Mary Oliver