“Aunt Elsie hears/Singing in the night,/So I am sent running/To search under the trees./I stand in the dark hearing nothing—/Or, at least not what she hears—/Uncle William singing again/Irish lullabies./I stay a while, then turn and go inside./Uncle William's been dead for years.”
Mary Oliver rarely wrote about people, reserving her voice mostly for the praise of the world in which we live—the world we are destroying—but when she did include people in her poetry, the portraits are startling in their intimacy; their completeness. In “Aunt Elsie's Night Music”, a family history is presented in six short movements. Spare. Quintessentially minimalist. An entire story. Canadian poet PK Page wrote an entire memoir in poetry, “Hand Luggage”, and why not? Just as much can be said, and said more succinctly, in poetry as in prose. Just as much can be said, and often more powerfully when spoken in poetry—which is a language of its own, embedded within every language.
Mary Oliver's poem about an aunt losing her memory is much more frightening than the magazine articles I've read on the topic. Marie Howe's “What the Living Do” was an immediate classic because the poem presented is universal, and belongs to anyone who hears it or reads it and says, “Yes, this is grieving—this is surviving someone. This is what the living do.”
This morning I huddled in from the rain finishing Margaret Atwood's most recent essay collection, “Burning Questions”, and near the end, in a piece called “Caight in Time's Current”, we find our beloved author musing on Poetry–the writing and reading of it. We also are given an intimate look into her most recent poetry collection, and it's title poem, “Dearly”, which I leave for you to discover on your own. Near the end of her essay she references the film “Il Postino”, and a scene in which a young man swipes some of Pablo Neruda's work to pass it off as his own in attempt to woo his paramour. “Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it. It belongs to those who need it'“, he says. And so it is.
I started this piece wondering where poetry came from, and see now there is no answer. Poetry comes from that wonderful place where we live uncomfortably with mystery, with inspiration and despite the fear of what may happen, we create something we can give to our fellow travellers in this perilous journey. Perhaps that is all our creating has ever really been—reaching out. An attempt to connect—I, too am here. I, too was here. What would life be if all mystery could be figured out? Quantified and labeled? Living with mystery is an uneasy feeling, seeing how we humans like to know and define phenomena. Luckily for us, some things—the best, the origins of the best—are unknowable.
Amen and thank you for, “Living with mystery is an uneasy feeling, seeing how we humans like to know and define phenomena. Luckily for us, some things—the best, the origins of the best—are unknowable.”