by Mary Oliver
Winter Hours
Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
Mary Oliver
* * *
A MARINER BOOK
Houghton Mifflin Company
BOSTON NEW YORK
* * *
First Mariner Books edition 2000
Copyright © 1999 by Mary Oliver
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this
book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oliver, Mary, date.
Winter hours : prose, prose poems, and poems / Mary Oliver,
p. cm.
ISBN 0-395-85084-3
ISBN 0-395-85087-8 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3565.L5W56 1999 811'.54—DC21 99-19141 CIP
Book design by Anne Chalmers
Typeface: Adobe Garamond
Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5
The drawing of Shelley's boat, used here on the cover and title page, is redrawn from a sketch made by Shelley's friend and sailing companion Edward Williams. It is from Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams: Shelley's Friends, Their Journals and Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951).
The Swan (poem) appears in the book House of Light. Copyright © 1990 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
* * *
FOR
MOLLY MALONE COOK
* * *
"I will not knowingly tell you a single untruth."
—Ywain the Knight of the Lion
* * *
Foreword
Reader, you may call what follows a collection of essays. I have in enough instances, though not in every instance, attempted to surround and surmount a subject, as it is said a proper essay should do. Whether I have done so with sufficient distinction, you may decide. The truth is that I was not holding the essay in mind, not exactly. I was thinking rather of Samuel Johnson's kind of "writing"—I don't mean his persuasions and logics, but his ruminations and conversations, which are so informed and lively, and kindly even in their wit, and which are built always upon the bedrock of his devotion to civilized life as they expand, as they are lit by his pointed and delicious waggery. It cannot be a fault, I am sure, to have taken such elevation as a model. Nor do I mean, by exposing it, to imply success, but only to reveal the ambition that fueled me.
Everything in this book is true, in the autobiographical sense of the word. That is, I have not written here out of imagination and invention, but out of meditation and memory. No doubt my memory has the usual partiality of the individual, and is not entirely trustworthy. Still, I have been loyal here to the experiences of my own life and not, as is required in the more designed arts, to the needs of the line or the paragraph.
I have felt all my life that I was wise, and tasteful too, to speak very little about myself—to deflect the curiosity in the personal self that descends upon writers, especially in this country and at this time, from both casual and avid readers. My feelings have changed, to some degree anyway. I am now neither a young writer nor a middle-aged writer but whatever comes next—although, surely, I am not yet old! I have published books for more than thirty-five-years and written longer than that, and my work has found readers enough to create a small but persistent interest in my actual life.
Therefore I find a compelling reason to write something revealing, a little, my private and natural self—to offer something that must in the future be taken into consideration by any who would claim to know me. I am only too aware of the ways in which inclination and supposition will fill whatever spaces in this world, or a life, are left vacant. And so I say again: I myself am the author of this document; it has no other formal persona, as my books of poems certainly do.
Neither are these writings of event or of periods of time exactly, but created out of mood, of reaction to various happenings in the world, and of my own searchings and findings in, if you will allow it, the fields of the spirit. Not that the flesh here does not also sing in its human house; there is that too.
But don't look for a portrait that is chronological, or talks much about my professional life, or opens to public view the important and proper secrets of a heart. Consider what is written rather as parts of a conversation, or a long and slowly arriving letter—somewhat disorderly, natural in expression, and happily unfinished.
***
Poe, Frost, Hopkins, and Whitman were subjects of interest in classes I recently taught at Bennington College, in Vermont, where I now live part of each year.
* * *
Contents
PART ONE
Building the House • [>]
Sister Turtle • [>]
The Swan • [>]
Three Prose Poems • [>]
Moss • [>]
Once • [>]
The Whistler • [>]
PART TWO
The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe's Dream of Recapturing the Impossible • [>]
A Man Named Frost • [>]
The Poem as Prayer, the Prayer as Ornament: Gerard Manley Hopkins • [>]
Some Thoughts on Whitman • [>]
PART THREE
The Boat • [>]
Sand Dabs, Four • [>]
Sand Dabs, Five • [>]
Sand Dabs, Six • [>]
Swoon • [>]
The Storm • [>]
PART FOUR
Winter Hours • [>]
Acknowledgments • [>]
PART ONE
Essays and Poems
Building the House
1
I KNOW A YOUNG MAN who can build almost anything—a boat, a fence, kitchen cabinets, a table, a barn, a house. And so serenely, and in so assured and right a manner, that it is joy to watch him. All the same, what he seems to care for best—what he seems positively to desire—is the hour of interruption, of hammerless quiet, in which he will sit and write down poems or stories that have come into his mind with clambering and colorful force. Truly he is not very good at the puzzle of words—not nearly as good as he is with the mallet and the measuring tape—but this in no way lessens his pleasure. Moreover, he is in no hurry. Everything he learned, he learned at a careful pace—will not the use of words come easier at last, though he begin at the slowest trot? Also, in these intervals, he is happy. In building things, he is his familiar self, which he does not overvalue. But in the act of writing he is a grander man, a surprise to us, and even more to himself. He is beyond what he believed himself to be.
I understand his pleasure. I also know the enclosure of my skills, and am no less pert than he when some flow takes me over the edge of it. Usually, as it happens, this is toward the work in which he is so capable. There appears in my mind a form; I imagine it from boards of a certain breadth and length, and nails, and all in cheerful response to some need I have or think I have, aligned with a space I see as opportunistic. I would not pry my own tooth, or cobble my own shoes, but I deliberate unfazed the niceties of woodworking—nothing, all my life, has checked me. At my side at this moment is a small table with one leg turned in slightly. For I have never at all built anything perfectly, or even very well, in spite of the pleasure such labor gives me. Nor am I done yet, though time has brought obstacles and spread them before me—a stiffness of the fingers, a refusal of the eyes to switch easily from near to far, or rather from far to near, and thus to follow the aim of the hammer toward the nail head, which yearly grows smaller, and smaller.
Once, in fact, I built a house. It was
a minuscule house, a one-room, one-floored affair set in the ivies and vincas of the backyard, and made almost entirely of salvaged materials. Still, it had a door. And four windows. And, miraculously, a peaked roof, so I could stand easily inside, and walk around. After it was done, and a door hung, I strung a line from the house so that I could set a lamp upon the built-in table, under one of the windows. Across the yard, in the evening with the lamplight shining outward, it looked very sweet, and it gave me much satisfaction. It seemed a thing of great accomplishment, as indeed, for me, it was. It was the house I had built. There would be no other.
The labor of writing poems, of working with thought and emotion in the encasement (or is it the wings?) of language, is strange to nature, for we are first of all creatures of motion. Only secondly—only oddly, and not naturally, at moments of contemplation, joy, grief, prayer, or terror—are we found, while awake, in the posture of deliberate or hapless inaction. But such is the posture of the poet, poor laborer. The dancer dances, the painter dips and lifts and lays on the oils; the composer reaches at least across the octaves. The poet sits. The architect draws and measures, and travels to the quarry to tramp among the gleaming stones. The poet sits, or, if it is a fluid moment, he scribbles some words upon the page. The body, under this pressure of non-existing, begins to draw up like a muscle, and complain. An unsolvable disharmony of such work—the mind so hotly fired and the body so long quiescent—will come sooner or later to revolution, will demand action! For many years, in a place I called Blackwater "Woods, I wrote while I walked. That motion, hardly more than a dreamy sauntering, worked for me; it kept my body happy while I scribbled. But sometimes it wasn't at all enough. I wanted to build, in the other way, with the teeth of the saw, and the explosions of the hammer, and the little shrieks of the screws winding down into their perfect nests.
2
I began the house when I returned one spring after a year of teaching in a midwestern city. I had been, for months, responsible, sedate, thoughtful, and, for most of my daylight hours, indoors. I was sick for activity. And so, instead of lingering on the porch with my arrangement of tools, banging and punching together some simple and useful thing—another bookshelf, another table—I began the house.
When anything is built in our town, it is more importantly a foundation than a structure. Nothing—be it ugly, nonconforming, in violation of bylaws or neighbors' rights—nothing, once up, has ever been torn down. And almost nothing exists as it was originally constructed. On our narrow strip of land we are a build-up, add-on society. My house today, crooked as it is, stands. It has an undeniable value: it exists. It may therefore be enlarged eventually, even unto rentable proportions. The present owners of the property would not dream of discarding it. I can see from the road, they have given it a new roof and straightened out some doubtful portions of the peaked section. To one end of the peak, they have attached a metal rod that holds, in the air above the house, a statue of a heron, in the attitude of easy flight. My little house, looking upward, must be astonished.
The tools I used in my building of the house, and in all my labor of this sort, were a motley assortment of hand tools: hammer, tack hammer, drivers of screws, rasps, planes, saws small-toothed and rip, pliers, wrenches, awls. They had once belonged to my grandfather, and some of them to my great-grandfather, who was a carpenter of quality, and used the finer title cabinet-maker. This man I know only from photographs and an odd story or two: for example, he built his own coffin, of walnut, and left it, to be ready when needed, with the town mortician. Eventually, like the tiniest of houses, and with his body inside, it was consumed by flame.
These tools, though so closely mine, were not made therefore easy for me to use. I was, frankly, accident-prone; while I was making anything my hands and shins and elbows, if not other parts of my body, were streaked with dirt and nicks. Gusto, not finesse, was my trademark here. And often enough, with these tools, I would come to a place where I could not wrest some necessary motion from my own wrists, or lift, or cut through. Then I would have to wait, in frustration, for a friend or acquaintance, or even a stranger—male, and stronger than I—to come along, and I would simply ask for help to get past that instant, that twist of the screw. Provincetown men, though they may seem rough to the unknowing, are as delicious and courteous as men are made. "Sure, darling," the plumber would say, or the neighbor passing by, or the fisherman stepping over from his yard, and he would help me, and would make a small thing of it.
3
Whatever a house is to the heart and body of man—refuge, comfort, luxury—surely it is as much or more to the spirit. Think how often our dreams take place inside the houses of our imaginations! Sometimes these are fearful, gloomy, enclosed places. At other times they are bright and have many windows and are surrounded by gardens combed and invitational, or un-pathed and wild. Surely such houses appearing in our sleep-work represent the state of the soul, or, if you prefer it, the state of the mind. Real estate, in any case, is not the issue of dreams. The condition of our true and private self is what dreams are about. If you rise refreshed from a dream—a night's settlement inside some house that has filled you with pleasure—you are doing okay. If you wake to the memory of squeezing confinement, rooms without air or light, a door difficult or impossible to open, a troubling disorganization or even wreckage inside, you are in trouble—with yourself. There are (dream) houses that pin themselves upon the windy porches of mountains, that open their own windows and summon in flocks of wild and colorful birds—and there are houses that hunker upon narrow ice floes adrift upon endless, dark waters; houses that creak, houses that sing; houses that will say nothing at all to you though you beg and plead all night for some answer to your vexing questions.
As such houses in dreams are mirrors of the mind or the soul, so an actual house, such as I began to build, is at least a little of that inner state made manifest. Jung, in a difficult time, slowly built a stone garden and a stone tower. Thoreau's house at Walden Pond, ten feet by fifteen feet under the tall, arrowy pines, was surely a dream-shape come to life. For anyone, stepping away from actions where one knows one's measure is good. It shakes away an excess of seriousness. Building my house, or anything else, I always felt myself becoming, in an almost devotional sense, passive, and willing to play. Play is never far from the impress of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery. Building my house, I was joyous all day long.
The material issue of a house, however, is a matter not so much of imagination and spirit as it is of particular, joinable, weighty substance—it is brick and wood, it is foundation and beam, sash and sill; it is threshold and door and the latch upon the door. In the seventies and the eighties, in this part of the world if not everywhere, there was an ongoing, monstrous binge of building, or tearing back and rebuilding—and carting away of old materials to the (then-titled) dump. Which, in those days, was a lively and even social place. Work crews made a continual effort toward bulldozing the droppings from the trucks into some sort of order, shoving at least a dozen categories of broken and forsaken materials, along with reusable materials, into separate areas. Gulls, in flocks like low, white clouds, screamed and rippled over the heaps of lumber, looking for garbage that was also dumped, and often in no particular area. Motels, redecorating, would bring three hundred mattresses in the morning, three hundred desks in the afternoon. Treasures, of course, were abundantly sought and found. And good wood—useful wood—wood it was a sin to bury, not to use again. The price of lumber had not yet skyrocketed, so even new lumber lay seamed in with the old, the price passed on to the customer. Cut-offs, and lengths. Pine, fir, oak flooring, shingles of red and white cedar, ply, cherry trim, also tarpaper and insulation, screen doors new and old, and stovepipe old and new, and bricks, and, more than once, some power tools left carelessly, I suppose, in a truck bed, under the heaps of trash. This is where I went for my materials, along with others, men and women both, who simply roved, attentively, through all the mess until
they found what they needed, or felt they would, someday, use. Clothes, furniture, old dolls, old highchairs, bikes; once a child's metal bank in the shape of a dog, very old; once a set of copper-bottomed cookware still in its original cartons; once a bag of old Christmas cards swept from the house of a man who had died only a month or so earlier, in almost every one of them a dollar bill.
Here I found everything I needed, including nails from half-full boxes spilled into the sand. All I lacked—only because I lacked the patience to wait until it came along—was one of the ridge beams; this I bought at the local lumber company and paid cash for; thus the entire house cost me $3.58.
Oh, the intimidating and beautiful hardwoods! No more could I cut across the cherry or walnut or the oak than across stone! It was pine I looked for, with its tawny pattern of rings, its crisp knots, its willingness to be broken, cut, split, and its fragrance that never reached the air but made the heart gasp with its sweetness. Plywood I had no love of, though I took it when found and used it when I could, knowing it was no real thing, and alien to the weather, and apt to parch and swell, or buckle, or rot. Still, I used it. My little house was a patchwork. It was organic as a garden. It was free of any promise of exact inches, though at last it achieved a fair if not a strict linearity. On its foundation of old railroad ties, its framing of old wood, old ply, its sheets of tarpaper, its rows of pale shingles, it stood up. Stemming together everything with sixpenny nails, eight-penny nails, spikes, screws, I was involved, frustrated, devoted, resolved, nicked and scraped, and delighted. The work went slowly. The roof went on, was shingled with red cedar. I was a poet, but I was away for a while from the loom of thought and formal language; I was playing. I was whimsical, absorbed, happy. Let me always be who I am, and then some.