Couldn't sleep last night, so I dug around the bedroom looking for a book that might help slow down my head. I got a Mary Oliver for Christmas -- "The Truro Bear and Other Adventures" which is a selection of old poems and prose with some new material. There was very little left to finish, and I moved from that to Seamus Heaney. It's been a long time since I've read him. Wonderful to read the two of them back to back.
They both write poetry grounded very much in experience. Something like Frost. Full of detail. Hyper-real. Mary Oliver always makes me want to go to the ocean. Seamus Heaney makes me think of history and home. Mary Oliver is all epiphany and wonder and gratitude. Heaney is weatherbeaten, dirt-under-the-fingernails, blue-collar. Oliver is goldenrod and owls and clear brooks. Heaney is potatoes and cast iron stoves and callused hands.
They both take me back to my childhood. Watching my father slowly fill the dooryard up with chopped wood. The impossible lightness of a swinging stall door. The warmth of hay. The cold of a dog's nose. Rusting pails and mossy stone walls and cinnamon spicey flowers. The angry bite of a wood stove on a lazy hand. The mysteries of insects, the unpredictability of cats, the strangeness of a goat's eyes, the mute dullness of a sheep.
It makes me sad for my own kids, that they don't have that kind of a playground, that forty-acre chemistry set and clubhouse. I wonder all the time what they'll remember of their own childhood. I know that some of my own strongest memories are of single vanishing moments. It's not the average of the experience that is burned into the mind, but the extremes. Not the rules, but the exceptions.
Here's to a year of exceptional exceptions.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
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