This week, a friend told me that she had taken Katherine May’s book Wintering, The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times to heart. As I understand it, this is not the retreat we associate with an artist residency that ends in a completed novel. May’s wintering may be akin to the slow breathing of hibernation, the body eating itself as it cycles down until spring. For humans, it comes with the painful understanding that the world continues to spin and bloom while your absence goes unnoticed. Mary Oliver’s poem October (which has been fresh at hand in our writing workshop) springs to mind. Oliver peers into the entrance of the cave and contemplates the bear that comes out for a final lumber through the field before it tucks itself away. Oliver recognizes that her life is in its final bloom. She has heard the song of the little dazzler, the chickadee. Next season’s flowers and blackberries, the water in the pond, these elements of beauty and sustenance are no longer for her consumption. Oliver concludes: “so this is the world. / I am not in it. / And it is beautiful.”
Melissa Black embellishes October with her own images. The impulse reminds me of how as a teenager I would listen to a song, stop the cassette tape and write down the line. I started and stopped that cassette until my pen and my ear had taught me every line. This tracing of the words in her own hand allows Melissa to the enter the cave of the writer and she sings a sort of back up to Oliver adding her own words.
Mariah Decker enters into Oliver’s work as a warped tree in her own poem, Death of Self. Mariah feels the sorrow of things that have bloomed and now decay. As a young person, she attaches to the pain of being sidelined, made invisible from a prison cell outside of nature.
The seasons, the dark of night, the life cycle impacts us all. In Times Up, J. Hunter compels us to consider the length of our lives, the questions we ask, and the paths we take. We experience time in our bodies and no matter who, the sands of our lives run out.
Stressla Lynn Johnson’s “What Is This …” was written after he suffered a string of family losses. As a person serving a life sentence, Stressla understands what it means to winter. Like Oliver, Stressla has embraced joy in the reflection of his life. He writes: “The smiles and tears that linger / create words and phrases transforming / these memories into waving fields of joy.” Stressla seems to inhabit a space like Oliver in which he can find celebration in having lived and loved. Of the poem, our Oregon State Penitentiary reader, Scott Bitter commented: “Stressla, you have accumulated a lifetime of joyful memories, which yield doubt-conquering hopes and feelings of love. Your chosen metaphorical description of a mirror of time, waving fields of joy, and moving whirlpools emphasize the lifetime emotions and feelings succinctly.”
Dustin Smith has watched the natural world closely in Learning to Be Dead. The mountains, and forest and ocean bring concrete lessons for those who listen patiently. Dustin writes: “I gradually learned to die / By watching the world around me;” While the self may learn to die, the poet exerts himself to record the reminders of beauty and fragility, of tide breaks against shores. The recording of the writer transcends the structure of his being. Eventually, winter will be over, and we’ll welcome the spring. | TDS