to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -/over
and over announcing your place/in the family of things.” She finds a similar
message in the life of a turtle: “she can’t see/herself apart from the rest of the
world/... she is a part of the pond she lives in, /the tall trees are her children, /the
birds that swim above her/are tied to her by an unbreakable string.”
The possibility of transcendence is everywhere in her work. In a particularly
beautiful poem Sleeping in the Forest, she describes sleeping with “...nothing/
between me and the white fire of the stars/but my thoughts, and they floated/
light as moths among the branches/of the perfect trees.” She concludes:
“All night/I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling/with a luminous doom. By
morning/I had vanished at least a dozen times/into something better.”
In truth, “vanishing into something better” was an art she perfected early, as a
matter of survival. Though rarely addressed directly in her work, Oliver suffered
a terrible childhood that cast a lifelong shadow. As she explained in her essay
“Staying Alive” in Upstream: Selected Essays, she survived by fleeing into the
twin refuges of literature and nature. In an interview with Maria Shriver in the
last decade of her life, she revealed that she had been sexually abused by her
father. It was the first time, she claimed, that she’d “said those words out loud.”
Already alienated from her peers by virtue of her sexuality and her sensitive,
literary temperament, it is not hard to see how the damage done by sexual abuse
would have driven her further away from human company and into the arms of
a natural world with which she already felt such an acute kinship. It is not hard
to see how Walt Whitman became her ersatz companion, how, in a world that
seemed to have little place for her, she found a kind of belonging in Emerson
and Emily Dickinson. In “My Friend Walt Whitman” from Upstream, she wrote:
“Whitman was the brother I did not have. I did have an uncle, whom I loved,
but he killed himself one rainy fall day; Whitman remained, perhaps more
avuncular for the loss of the other.”
In this environment of abuse and loss, it was trust that suffered the deepest
wounds. Thus, when she met Molly Cook, a person with whom she felt she could
let her guard down, she fell “hook and tumble.” Theirs was a loving relationship,
yet in interviews after Cook’s death, Oliver hinted at an imbalance. It is clear
that Cook was the dominant one in the relationship, protecting her introverted
partner from the unwelcome intrusion of the outside world. Yet as in all such
relationships of compensation, a certain price is paid. Though Cook’s death
brought intense grief, it seems that in the years thereafter, Oliver began to find
herself in a new way, not only developing a strong network of friendships, but
daring to expose her inner world in ways she never had before. Whereas in her
early work the poet was largely absent, no more than a witness to the intimate
MARY OLIVER81