Volume 4, No. 26: 30 Days of Water & The Words that Always Hold Me

Greetings, book and treat people! Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who’s subscribed in the last week. You can do that here. You can also pledge to subscribe, if that works better for you. I’m still pretty far away from my goal, but you know what? Anything’s possible!

Since my June reading reflections are basically a love letter to Mary Oliver, I want to first mention a few of the best books I read in June that were not Mary Oliver books. I highly recommend all of these gems:

She Tried Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks by M. NourbeSe Philip (poetry); Cinema Love  by Jiaming Tang (historical/contemporary queer fiction); Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle (essays on poetry); Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin (memoir); Still Life by Katherine Packert Burke (contemporary trans fiction); Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn (biography); The Address Book by Deidre Mask (nonfiction); and The Butterfly’s Burden by Mahmoud Darwish (poetry).

Now we can get back to one of my two reading loves of 2024 (the other one, obviously, is Martyr!).

I love doing these monthly reading reflections. At first I followed the same pattern every month, but now I’m trying something new each time. June was a weird month. It’s the beginning of summer, which is always a hard time for me. I can feel my body start to shut down and my energy begin to leak away. Outside my little corner of the world, there is my government, funding genocide in Gaza. There are millions of people suffering in Sudan. The paragraphs go on and on. None of it is ever very far away from me. In June I went to a protest. I donated some money to families in Gaza who are trying to live. I baked a strawberry cake. There were days when I did not want to get up and face the sun. I read some beautiful books. My living, the dailiness of it, feels so dissonant, so resonant.

Every day, I put my body into a body of water. Every day, I read Mary Oliver.

So instead of snippets about all the books I read, I’m going to try to show you a little bit of what my June felt like. 2024 has become my Year of Mary. I did not plan for this to happen, but I am endlessly grateful that it has. I’ve read thirteen books by Mary Oliver so far this year. They are remaking me. I recently learned that the Mary Oliver Papers are now available to researchers at the Library of Congress, and yes, I am planning a pilgrimage to DC.

In June I read Mary Oliver’s first two collections of poetry: No Voyage, published in 1965 when she was 30, and The River Styx, Ohio, published in 1972 (they are both out of print, but my library came through). It was like reading an entirely different poet. The poems in both collections are stuffy, formal, metrical verse. Much of No Voyage is dry, banal, full of grandiose exclamations about human nature. Some of the poems are so unspecific and generic they feel almost invisible.

I cannot explain to you how much I love this book. I cannot come up with the words for what a gift it is. Reading it was a sacred, spiritual act. It has become one of the most cherished reading experiences of my life. What luck (as Kaveh Akbar says) to get to witness this record of change, this beginning. What an honor, to see Mary Oliver stumbling into herself.

June: me stumbling into myself. A record of change. Heartbroken witnessing. An abundance of gifts. Every day piled high with grief and wonder and two things that always hold me: Mary Oliver’s words, and water.

So here are twenty photos, from twenty different days in June, of two bodies of water that I cherish: Ashfield Lake and my beloved spot on the Green River. I’ve paired them with twenty quotes from the thirteen Mary Oliver books I’ve read in 2024. This is what June felt like.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Life so far doesn’t have any other namebut breath and light, wind and rain.

from ‘What Is There Beyond Knowing’ in New and Selected Poems, Volume Two (June 2, video of sunlight and shadow reflecting on a gently rushing river)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedEvery day I see or I hear something that more or lesskills me with delight, that leaves me like a needlein the haystack of light.

from ‘Mindful’ in New and Selected Poems, Volume Two (June 4)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWhat can we dobut keep on breathing in and out,modest and willing, and in our places?Listen, listen, I'm forever saying,Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit—then I come up with a few words, like a gift.

from ‘Stars’ in New and Selected Poems, Volume Two (June 5, video of gently lapping waves across the surface of the lake on a clear day)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAnd 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.

from ‘Black Oaks’ in West Wind (June 6)

There’s this impulse to kind of misread Mary Oliver as simply glad or sweetly wise. She’s mainly talking about death, it seems to me.

Ross Gay, from Wild & Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver by Sophia Bush and Mary Oliver (June 7)

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision—a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.

from A Poetry Handbook (June 9)

Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless, each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it—indeed the world's need of it—these never pass.

from A Poetry Handbook (June 10)

In all our time together we were rarely separated. Three or four times I went away to teach, but usually M. would come with me, and we simply made our home, temporarily, somewhere else. And, while I always loved the stillness I found in the fields and the woods, our house was a different thing, and I loved that too. We were talkers about our work, our pasts, our friends, our ideas ordinary and far-fetched. We would often wake before there was light in the sky and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues. We would end in exhaustion and elation. Not many nights or early mornings later, we would do the same. It was a forty-year conversation.

from Our World (June 11)

It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness— an empathy—was necessary if the attention was to matter.

from Our World (June 12)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWhen it's over, I want to say all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement.I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

from ‘When Death Comes’ in At Blackwater Pond (June 14)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe Uses of Sorrow(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)Someone I loved once gave mea box full of darkness.It took me years to understandthat this, too, was a gift.

from Thirst (June 16)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published My heart sings but the apparatus of singing doesn't conveyhalf what it feels and means. In spring there's hope, in fall the exquisite, necessary diminishing, inwinter I am as sleepy as any beast in its leafy cave, but in summer there iseverywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts, the hospitality of the Lord and myinadequate answers as I row my beautiful, temporary body through this water-lily world.

from ‘Six Recognitions of the Lord’ in Thirst (June 17)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSo come to the pond,or the river of your imagination,or the harbor of your longing,And put your lips to the world.And liveyour life.

from in ‘Mornings at Blackwater in Red Bird (June 18, video of the still, blue water of Ashfield Lake)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSomething had pestered me so muchI thought my heart would break.I mean, the mechanical part.I went down in the afternoon to the seawhich held me, until I grew easy.

from ‘Swimming, One Day in August’ in Red Bird (June 19)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe Other KingdomsConsider the other kingdoms. Thetrees, for example, with their mellow-soundingtitles: oak, aspen, willow.Or the snow, for which the peoples of the northhave dozens of words to describe itsdifferent arrivals. Or the creatures, with theirthick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Theirinfallible sense of what their livesare meant to be. Thus the worldgrows rich, grows wild, and you too,grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you toowere born to be.

from The Truro Bear and Other Adventures (June 21, video of the still, glassy surface of the lake on a misty morning)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSweet world,Think not to confuse me with poems or love beginningWithout a sign or sound:Here at the edge of rivers hung with iceSpring is still miles away, and yet I wakeThroughout the dark, listen, and throb with allHer summoning explosions underground.

from ‘Being Country Bred’ in No Voyage (June 22)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI leap to live. O dark and out of sightThe far cliffs wait! My bodies burn and ache!I curve, I petrel through the webs of night.If I kept peace, I think my heart would break.Hope led me to this place. I leap to wake.

from ‘Spiritus Nascitur’ in No Voyage (June 23, video of a river rushing between and among rocks)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe longer I live the more I senseWilderness approaching: I used to walkMiles to find wild things; now they find me,Blossom under the very windows whereI am busy being grown up and tame.

from ‘Indian Pipes’ in The River Styx, Ohio (June 24)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedGoing to WaldenIt isn't very far as highways lie.I might be back by nightfall, having seenThe rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:How dull we grow from hurrying her and there!Many have gone, and think me half a foolTo miss a day away in the cool country.Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,Going to Walden is not so easy a thingAs a green visit. It is the slow and difficultTrick of living, and finding it where you are.

from The River Styx, Ohio (June 28)

Stay tender & wild, sweet friends.