The Wilderness Between

Mary Oliver’s Blue Iris was a very refreshing read after so many essays. I am not a poet myself, but I really enjoyed this collection. Her writing was excellent. It really captured the feel of these moments and sensations. Her work really reminded me of haiku. The essence or the feel of the work captures the “zen” of haiku, its gentleness and reflection. Too, her essays make you reconsider the thing itself as the poem goes on. Like “Touch Me Nots” or “Rice,” at the end of the poem, she comes back to the thing, and it has changed.

On the other hand, I admire her for not simply relying on the haiku, which is the traditional form (as far as I, the fiction writer, know) of combining poetry and nature. But there are still those passages that steal my breath. In “Touch Me Nots”: “a little raccoon inside/ praying,/ as it felt, over and over,/ the mesh of its capture”.

This image really stuck with me. The vulnerability it invokes, the helplessness. I think she gets this by using “little”, “praying”, and the repetition of “over and over”. It’s lovely.

I think my favorite poems though were “Roses”, “Some Questions You Might Ask”, and “Black Oaks”. But even as I list them, I can’t help but remember the one about sunflowers. Or the one about…

I won’t discuss all of them here, but since “Roses” keeps coming back to me, I’ll look a little deeper.

The look on her face in a dream

Stayed with me all day

Like a promise I had failed.

Not that I had made any—

Not that I could remember—

But she was looking into the north

Where nothing lives but white clouds

Of crying birds, like bits of snow.

And the grass on which she was standing,

And the roses thick on the fences

Were soft and bright, able to renew themselves

As a woman, finally, cannot do.

First, I love that it starts with a dream. It makes the peaceful, sort of foggy details that come even better. Really, it is the third stanza that makes it. Oliver makes us look north, and then breaks, “where nothing lives”. Beautiful. Then white. Clouds of birds, snow. Gorgeous. And then I really love how the story comes back around to the woman and the promise. The last line really rings with such finality. Probably because of that word. Final. And Cannot.

I’m not sure that my poetry is quite up to par to be able to ramble off even a draft of a poem right now. However, I can share my personal experience with roses, and we can pretend that it is crafted well enough to be a lyrical essay.

When my mother moved into her own house after the divorce, she began to take gardening very seriously. She went to the gardening store at the end of the street every weekend to pick up some new bud, or seed. After some time, I prevailed upon her to try roses. I was probably twelve and fancied myself to be like Belle from “Beauty and the Beast,” and so I wanted roses. I thought that this would be my break into gardening, and I was determined to grow beautiful red roses.

My mother bought two bushes for me and, catching my excitement, helped me plant them. Romantics, both of us, we planned to coax them over the dilapidated shed in our backyard. However, the bushes were not what I expected. They looked more like gnarled fingers pinching at the ground rather than the beautiful plants I had seen in books. My mother and I took extra care of the plants. Every afternoon, once my mom came home from work, we would survey the bushes, trying to read their signs.

However, despite all of our care and our desire, the bushes withered and died in front of us. We watched as the few leaves that had come attached, became brown and brittle. The petals of the few buds that had initially taken shape wilted and withered. Instead of a lesson on gardening and life, the bushes became an instruction on death.