Spiritual Sunday
Today I am attending the memorial service of my Aunt Betsy Conant, who died after a long bout with Alzheimer’s, and I will be reading a Mary Oliver poem. As I have noted in previous posts on Oliver, she is an intensely spiritual poet and her poems are often shaped by the narrative of despair saved by grace. Even though she is never overtly religious, she frequently resorts to religious language.
“In Blackwater Woods,” the poem I have selected, has a striking image of autumn trees as “pillars of light,” reminiscent of the pillar of fire that led Moses and the Israelites into unknown territory. In this case, the unknown territory is death, and Oliver imagines crossing a “black river of loss whose other side is salvation.” What this salvation consists of, Oliver acknowledges, “none of us will ever know.”
It is because we don’t know that we must live fully in this world, with its “rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment.” Sounding strangely definitive after just having admitted her ignorance, Oliver gives us three rules for life. The last of these rules is what our memorial service is for: we loved Betsy dearly, loved her as though our own life depended on it, but now the time has come for us to let her go.
In Blackwater Woods
by Mary Oliver
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.
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