Mary Oliver Monday - The Summer Day for a perfect summer day

THE SUMMER DAY by Mary Oliver from New and Selected Poems:  Volume One (Beacon Press)
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Sometimes it's a good idea to hold on to a thing, to keep the obvious tucked away until the time isn't merely good, rather, exquisitely perfect, to make your oblation.  Then, you can pull out what has been saved with a flourish and cry, "Voila!" turning something ubiquitous into something magical.

In as many times as I've posted a Mary Oliver poem on this blog, I've shied away from "The Summer Day,"  preferring to offer poems that are less well known and definitely less well quoted.  But something about this morning's clear blue sky, the breeze ruffling the grass, the sound of the cicadas in the maple tree outside my bedroom window, and the work I have to do the rest of the day made me realize it is indeed the perfect day for "The Summer Day."

Voila!  I give you the magic of Mary Oliver.

A particular eastern tiger swallow tail
visiting my wildflower garden

The magic for me this morning comes in hearing something new in a poem that I've read a gazillion
times before.  As with many people, I'm often left pondering the punch of the poem's last lines.  What captured my attention today though were the stepping stones of the first lines, that movement from the universal (literally) to the particularity of one specific grasshopper.

So, rather than viewing little details as distractions that lead me away from the picture work I have to do today, the invitation to me is to see in the particulars the opportunity to pay attention.  Quite a challenge for an Enneagram 7 and a Myers Briggs INFP but I'll give it a go, because who am I to argue with a Mary Oliver poem?

At Least

AT LEAST

by Raymond Carver from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (Vintage Books)

I want to get up early one more morning,
before sunrise. Before the birds, even.
I want to throw cold water on my face
and be at my work table
when the sky lightens and smoke
begins to rise from the chimneys
of the other houses.
I want to see the waves break
on this rocky beach, not just hear them
break as I did all night in my sleep.
I want to see again the ships
that pass through the Strait from every
seafaring country in the world—
old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,
and the swift new cargo vessels
painted every color under the sun
that cut the water as they pass.
I want to keep an eye out for them.
And for the little boat that plies
the water between the ships
and the pilot station near the lighthouse.
I want to see them take a man off the ship
and put another up on board.
I want to spend the day watching this happen
and reach my own conclusions.
I hate to seem greedy—I have so much
to be thankful for already.
But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.
And go to my place with some coffee and wait.
Just wait, to see what's going to happen.


Chances are very slim that I'll ever be up and at my desk before sunrise.  As I wrote yesterday, I may wake up with the sun, but I like that time in bed in the morning before I start my day.  However, like Raymond Carver, I would like to be able to wake up one day, make my cup of tea, open the blinds to my bedroom windows, sit at my desk and just wait to see what happens. 

It's not that I can't or don't see what happens outside my window during the course of the day now--the machine gun chatter of squirrels waging territorial battle for squatting rights on the backyard fence, the burgundy buds that have started to stain the tips of tree branches, a parade of unknown neighbors marching to and from the bus stop.  I can see all these things, and more, if I really pay attention.  Too often, though, I just don't.  My focus is elsewhere.  The world around me is a blur-- broad strokes of color in an impressionist painting that give me a sense of my surroundings but not the details, the particularity. 

As I thought about this, the phrase, "The devil is in the details," came to mind so I looked it up.  It turns out that the original saying was "God is in the detail," or, if Gustave Flaubert is the author of the phrase as some suggest, "Le bon Dieu est dans le détail."  (The good God is in the detail.)   When I go through my day without really seeing the details, I miss a glimpse of the holy, the sacred that is manifest in the world around me.  Surely I don't have to get out of bed before sunrise to do this-- I simply have to open my eyes and see.

What have you seen today?