Winter Hours

by Mary Oliver

  Now she might have been asleep as she lay, lover-like, alongside the cricket's body. Later—hours later—she moved down along its bronze chest, and there fed again. Slowly her shrunken body grew larger, then very large. And then it was night.

  ***

  Early in the morning, the cricket was gone. As I learned from later examples, when the quiescent cricket was no more than a shell, she had cut it loose. It had dropped to the cellar floor, where any number of living crickets occasionally went leaping by. By any one of them it had been dragged away. Now the spider, engorged, was motionless. She slept with her limbs enfolded slightly—the same half clench of limbs one sees in the bodies of dead spiders—but this was the twilight rest, not the final one. This was the restoration, the interval, the sleep of the exhausted and the triumphant.

  I have not yet described the mystery and enterprise for which she lives—the egg sacs and the young spiders. They emerge from their felt balloon and hang on threads near it: a fling, a nebula. Only by putting one's face very close, and waiting, and not breathing, can one actually see that the crowd is moving. It is motion not at all concerted or even definite but it is motion, and that, compared with no movement at all, is of course everything. And it grows. Perhaps the spiders feel upon the tender hairs of their bodies the cool, damp cellar air, and it is a lure. They want more. They want to find out things. The tiny limbs stretch and shuffle.

  Little by little, one or two, then a dozen, begin to drift into a wider constellation—toward the floor or the stair wall—spreading outward even as the universe is said to be spreading toward the next adventure and the next, endlessly.

  In six or seven days after their birth, the little spiders are gone. And my attention passes from that opened and shrunken pod to the next below it, which is still secretly ripening, in which the many minuscule bodies are still packed tightly together, like a single thing.

  How do they get out of the egg sac? Do they tear it with their fragile limbs? Do they chew it with their unimaginably tiny mouths?

  I do not know.

  Nor do I know where they all go, though I can imagine the dispersal of thousands into the jaws of the pale, leaping crickets. Certainly only a few of them survive, or we would be awash upon their rippling exertions.

  Only once in this space of time, after the bursting of three of the six pods, did I see what was clearly a young spider; many times its original birth size and still no larger than a pencil's point, it was crawling steadily away through a last hem of the mother web.

  This is the moment in an essay when the news culminates and, subtly or bluntly, the moral appears. It is a music to be played with the lightest fingers. All the questions that the spider's curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and morel I have seen it with my own eyes!

  But a spider? Even that?

  Even that.

  Our time in this rented house was coming to an end. For days I considered what to do with the heroine of this story and her enterprise, or if I should do anything at all. The owners of the house were to return soon; no reason to think they would not immediately sweep her away. And, in fact, we had ordered a housecleaning directly following our departure. Should I attempt to move her, therefore? And if so, to what place? To the dropping temperatures of the yard, where surely she could not last out the coming winter? To another basement corner? But would the crickets be there? Would the shy male spider find her? Could I move the egg sacs without harming them, and the web intact, to hold them?

  Finally, I did nothing. I simply was not able to risk wrecking her world, and I could see no possible way I could move the whole kingdom. So I left her with the only thing I could—the certainty of a little more time. For our explicit and stern instructions to the cleaners were to scrub the house—but to stay out of this stairwell altogether.

  The Storm

  Now through the white orchard my little dog

  romps, breaking the new snow

  with wild feet.

  Running here running there, excited,

  hardly able to, stop, he leaps, he spins

  until the white snow is written upon

  in large, exuberant letters,

  a long sentence, expressing

  the pleasures of the body in this world.

  Oh, I could not have said it better

  myself.

  PART FOUR

  Winter Hours

  Winter Hours

  1

  IN THE WINTER I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of———. But I don't know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.

  Because my workday begins early, it begins, in winter, in the huge, tense blackness of the world.

  The house is hard cold. Winter walks up and down the town swinging his censer, but no smoke or sweetness comes from it, only the sour, metallic frankness of salt and snow. I dress in the dark and hurry out. The sleepy dogs walk with me a few strides, then they disappear. The water slaps crisply upon the cold-firmed sand. I listen intently, as though it is a language the ocean is speaking. There are no stars, nor a moon. Still I can tell that the tide is rising, as it speaks singingly, and I can see a little from the street lamps and from the amber lights along the wharf. The water tosses its black laces and flaunts, streaked with the finest tain. Now and again the dogs come back, their happy feet dashing the sand. Before we reach the sea wall again, and cross the yard, it is no longer night. We stand by the door of the house. We stand upon the thin blue peninsula that leads to the sharp, white day. A small black cat bounds from under the rose bushes; the dogs bark joyfully.

  This is the beginning of every day.

  I have never been to Rome. I have never been to Paris, or Greece, or Sweden, or India. I went once to England, so long ago it seems like the Middle Ages. M. and I went once to the Far East, Japan and Malaysia and New Zealand and Indonesia, and I am glad I saw the Southern Cross, but I have not forgotten how it felt to think I was going to fall off the planet. I am not a traveler. Not of that sort.

  I do know the way to the grocery store, and I can get that far. The simples of our lives: bread, fruit, vegetables. In the big store. The old small stores, with which I was long familiar, are gone. Though there are new ones, to suit new purposes. Previously there were small shops because it was a small town. Now there are small shops because the tourists want to think they are still in that little town, which has vanished. It is good business now to appear antiquated, with narrow aisles and quaintly labeled jars.

  From the oldest resource of all, the sea, still comes food, occasionally, by hook or by chance. One morning I find three fish on the beach as fresh as young celery—cod, each of them a little over a foot long. I bring them home. The largest of the three has been gaffed, so it is apparent the fish came from the wharf, having escaped some packing crate or boat. The three fish have made their landfall close together, which bespeaks the purposeful motions of the tide as it laps toward shore. The fish are exquisite, with torpedo-shaped bodies, dark speckles under a sea-green glaze, hard heads with a fleshy jaw appendage, large eyes. They have many small cutting teeth, but by no means like those of the more aggressive bluefish. Neither is there any sudden place along the spine where the hand, unaware, could be badly tapped or torn, as there is on the body of the bluefish.

  I clean the fish and call M. to come and see the insides of the last one, before I scoop the ship of its body to a
smooth emptiness. The many shapes and shades of pink are astounding—the heart, the frillery and drapery of the lungs, the swim bladder, the large liver. The tongue in the wide mouth, pale and fat, is like the tongue of a newborn pug.

  In fact, there is something called tongues and cheeks in the fish shops. Now I see on each head two areas, the size of half-dollars, where I might have lifted out a fine plug of flesh, and gone a-chowdering. Instead I take the heads, spines, etc., out to the beach, in a blue pail, and dump them on an influx of sand. A few gulls in the distance cry out and are there almost on the instant, on one wing-pull. They make quick work of all of it, in the pink-tipped late afternoon light.

  The fish are delicious.

  For years when the tide was high I went, early or late, to another part of the world, which is mostly pinewoods. What you imagine when I say "pine" might not be our variety, which is also called pitch pine, or scrub pine. It is a modest tree, twisty and aromatic. It can live in the face of the sea wind, giving up its chances for girth and height, perhaps, for valuable elasticity. There are black oaks also, and tupelos that tend to set down roots in the dampness along the edges of the ponds.

  Through these woods I have walked thousands of times. For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house. Stepping out into the world, into the grass, onto the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight. I was stepping across some border. I don't mean just that the world changed the other side of the border, but that I did too. Eventually I began to appreciate—I don't say this lightly—that the great black oaks knew me. I don't mean they knew me as myself and not another—that kind of individualism was not in the air—but that they recognized and responded to my presence, and to my mood. They began to offer, or I began to feel them offer, their serene greeting. It was like a quick change of temperature, a warm and comfortable flush, faint yet palpable, as I walked toward them and beneath their outflowing branches.

  In the pinewoods is where the owl floats, and where the white egret paces, in summer, like a winged snake, in the flashing shallows. Here is where two deer approached me one morning, in an unforgettable sweetness, their faces like light brown flowers, their eyes kindred and full of curiosity. The mouth of one of them, and its vibrant tongue, touched my hand. This is where the coyotes appeared, one season, and followed me, bold beyond belief, and nimble—lean ferocities just held in check. This is where, once, I heard suddenly a powerful beating of wings, a feisty rhythm, a pomp of sound, within it a thrust then a slight uptake. The wings of angels might sound so, who are after all not mild but militant, and cross the skies on important missions. Then, just above the trees, their feet trailing and their eyes blazing, two swans flew by.

  The world changes. Now the entrance to the pinewoods is closed and barred at night, at least in the warm seasons, and one may not enter until this barrier is moved back, which happens hours past sunrise. And any day of the year, dogs are banned, or must walk, leashed, along a single designated path. The rangers carry firearms and handcuffs and ride squat vehicles over the dunes or past the twisty pine groves. They are looking for trouble: running dogs, campers, lovers, someone with a handful of flowers or a pail of cranberries; someone who has moved the barrier aside and come in, to stroll updune in time to see the sun float into the world, pink rose of peace, from the dark horizon. They shall be found, and they will be fined, and chastised.

  Of course I know a path or two where I can sneak in, to the owl and the snow and the sunrise. But I do it less and less. It's not the fine but the apprehension that has ruined my visitation, which was such a deep excitement and such a serious part of my life and my writing. Pleasure was my text; how could I contrive pleasure where I have become the hunted?

  There is a place in the woods, though, where the vanishing bodies of our dogs, our dogs of the past, lie in the sweet-smelling earth. How they ran through these woods! Too late, world, to deny them their lives of motion, of burly happiness.

  After Luke died, I crossed and recrossed the Province-lands, wherever we had been, and wherever I found her pawprints in the sand I dragged branches and leaves and slabs of bark over them, so they would last, would keep from the wind a long time. Then, overnight, after maybe three weeks, in a dazzling, rearranging rain, they were gone.

  Morning, for me, is the time of best work. My conscious thought sings like a bird in a cage, but the rest of me is singing too, like a bird in the wind. Perhaps something is still strong in us in the morning, the part that is untamable, that dreams willfully and crazily, that knows reason is no more than an island within us.

  In the act of writing the poem, I am obedient, and submissive. Insofar as one can, I put aside ego and vanity, and even intention. I listen. What I hear is almost a voice, almost a language. It is a second ocean, rising, singing into one's ear, or deep inside the ears, whispering in the recesses where one is less oneself than a part of some single indivisible community. Blake spoke of taking dictation. I am no Blake, yet I know the nature of what he meant. Every poet knows it. One learns the craft, and then casts off. One hopes for gifts. One hopes for direction. It is both physical, and spooky. It is intimate, and inapprehensible. Perhaps it is for this reason that the act of first-writing, for me, involves nothing more complicated than paper and pencil. The abilities of a typewriter or computer would not help in this act of slow and deep listening.

  I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, along the pale slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendant relationship to rapture, and with words I celebrate this rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest.

  Persons environmentally inclined have suggested that I am one of them. I don't argue with them, but it's not quite a fit. My work doesn't document any of the sane and learned arguments for saving, healing, and protecting the earth for our existence. What I write begins and ends with the act of noticing and cherishing, and it neither begins nor ends with the human world. Maybe I would be an environmentalist if I thought about it. But I don't. I don't think in terms of the all, the network of our needs and our misdeeds, the interrelationship of our lives and the lives of all else. On the contrary, I am forever just going out for a walk and tripping over the root, or the petal, of some trivia, then seeing it as if in a second sight, as emblematic. By no means is this a unique way to live but is, rather, the path found by all who are mystically inclined.

  Further, the world makes a great distinction between kinds of life: human on the one hand, all else on the other hand. Or it throws everything into two categories: animate, and inanimate. Which are neither of them distinctions I care about. The world is made up of cats, and cattle, and fenceposts! A chair is alive. The blue bowl of the pond, and the blue bowl on the table, that holds six apples, are all animate, and have spirits. The coat, the paper clip, the shovel, as well as the lively rain-dappled grass, and the thrush singing his gladness, and the rain itself. What are divisions for, if you look into it, but to lay out a stratification—that is, to suggest where an appreciative or not so appreciative response is proper, to each of the many parts of our indivisible world?

  What I want to describe in my poems is the nudge, the prick of the instant, the flame of appreciation that shoots from my heels to my head when compass grass bends its frilled branches and draws a perfect circle on the cold sand; or when the yellow wasp comes, in fall, to my wrist and then to my plate, to ramble the edges of a smear of honey.

  There is nothing so special in this, I know. Neither does it prove anything. But living like this is for me the difference between a luminous life and a ho-hum life. So be it! With my whole heart, I live as I live. My affinity is to the whimsical, the illustrative, the suggestive—not to the factual or the useful. I walk, and I notice. I am sensual in order to be spiritual. I look into everything without cutting into anything. And then I come home and M. says—she always says it!— How w
as it? The answer has never varied or been less than spontaneous: It was wonderful.

  M. and I met in the late fifties. For myself it was all adolescence again—shivers and whistles. Certainty. We have lived together for more than thirty years, so far. I would not tell much about it. Privacy, no longer cherished in the world, is all the same still a natural and sensible attribute of paradise. We are happy, and we are lucky. We are neither political nor inclined to likecompany. Repeat: we are happy, and we are lucky. We make for each other: companionship, intimacy, affection, rhapsody. Whenever I hear of something horrible, I want to cover M. s ears. Whenever I see something beautiful, and my heart is shouting, it is M. I run to, to tell about it.

  2

  When I write about nature directly, or refer to it, here are some things I don't mean, and a few I do. I don't mean nature as ornamental, however scalloped and glowing it may be. I don't mean nature as useful to man if that possibility of utility takes from an object its own inherent value. Or, even, diminishes it. I don't mean nature as calamity, as vista, as vacation or recreation. I don't mean landscapes in which we find rest and pleasure—although we do—so much as I mean landscapes in which we are reinforced in our sense of the world as a mystery, a mystery that entails other privileges besides our own—and also, therefore, a hierarchy of right and wrong behaviors pertaining to that mystery, diminishing it or defending it.

  The man who does not know nature, who does not walk under the leaves as under his own roof, is partial and wounded. I say this even as wilderness shrinks beneath our unkindnesses and our indifference. Nature there will always be, but it will not be what we have now, much less the deeper fields and woodlands many of us remember from our childhood. The worlds of van Gogh and Turner and Winslow Homer, and Wordsworth too, and Frost and Jeffers and Whitman, are gone, and will not return. We can come to our senses yet, and rescue the world, but we will never return it to anything like its original form.