Progressive Wednesday

National Poetry Month: “In Blackwater Woods”

April 9th, 2007 by Matt

Editor’s note: This is the second in our series of posts celebrating National Poetry Month. For an explanation, click this sentence. To read last week’s poem, click this sentence.

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There are many poets who I think are good. Fewer that I think are great. A handful, if that, that I’m in awe of. Mary Oliver falls into that last category, and she’s easily one of my favorite five.

I first came to know Oliver’s poems as an undergrad at Ohio University, when I heard her read her work. I was hooked. There have been days in my life when I honestly don’t know what I would have done without her glorious depictions of the natural world and the wisdom she shares. And I don’t know anyone who can write about the natural world head-on so often and manage to avoid sentimentality. Oliver doesn’t romanticize; she paints nature clearly, full of loss and hope, two emotions more closely paired than we probably realize. A Poetry Handbook, one of her books of nonfiction, made me believe in a life as a writer.

Oliver has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Simply put: she’s the shit.

So this Monday, this first day of the work-week, a day that can make us all a little more weary and worn than normal, let me share with you one of my favorite poems ever written: “In Blackwater Woods.” I’ll write nothing more about the piece other than to say this: I wish, one day, to ink something this pitch-perfect.

Enjoy.

.

IN BLACKWATER WOODS

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.