sensual pleasure in ‘‘Looking for Mushrooms,’’
the poetic persona perceives the hunt and capture
of the delectable ‘‘salvo of the forest’’ as ‘‘rich /
and romping on the tongue’’ for man and beast
alike. Yet, in the ‘‘Bone Poem’’ that follows, as she
comes upon the ‘‘rat litter’’ at the bottom of the
owl’s tree, she recognizes the owl’s most recent
sensual delight not only as being part of the eter-
nal food chain but also as eventually dissolving
‘‘back to the center’’ where ‘‘the rat will learn to
fly, the owl / will be devoured.’’ And, Oliver cel-
ebrates motherly love in both the human and
animal world. In ‘‘Snow Moon—Black Bear
Gives Birth,’’ the mother bear washes and snug-
gles her newborn, gives them the ‘‘rich river’’ of
her nipples, and thus establishes each one as ‘‘an
original.’’ A mother’s love changes, though, from
joy to a pain that ‘‘lashes out with a cutting edge’’
in ‘‘Strawberry Moon.’’ Elizabeth Fortune is not
only left by ‘‘the young man / full of promises, and
the face of the moon / a white fire’’ but also
separated from the child born out of wedlock,
being forced by society to ‘‘climb in the attic.’’
As Oliver celebrates the themes of birth,
decay, death, dreams, change, sensual pleasure,
and love, she asserts their equal and certain exis-
tence for both man and animal. In fact, she
assures modern man of his survival because he is
part of the natural world and its rejuvenating
potential. This assurance, though, includes the
experience of beauty, joy, and sensual pleasure
as well as that of mystery, terror, and pain.
According to Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver relates
these experiences to an essential tension and lone-
liness man experiences ashe lives simultaneously
in two worlds—the personal, familial, human
world and the inhuman, impersonal, natural
world. Within the human world, man essentially
struggles alone to find a sense of identity, peace,
and immortality. In the poem ‘‘John Chapman,’’
an eccentric, anti-socialold man of the Ohio for-
ests becomes a ‘‘good legend’’ by planting and
giving away apple trees. He decides not to die to
‘‘the secret, and the pain’’ of unrequited love but
‘‘to live, to go on caring about something.’’ In
‘‘Dreams,’’ the narrator compares a single rain-
swollen creek’s rushing drive and desire for ‘‘a
new life in a new land / where vines tumble thick
as ship-ropes, / The ferns grow tall as trees!’’ to two
pioneering great-uncles who got lost in Colorado
looking for the good life. With ‘‘pounding heart
and pride,’’ she celebrates them as ‘‘full of hope
and vision; /... healthy as animals, and rich / as
their dreams... ’’—at peace and immortalized
before they died alone.
Manousos suggests that Oliver then counter-
balances man’s dream of immortality with man’s
struggle to survive mortality—his subjection to
increasingly waning natural powers after birth. In
‘‘Ice,’’ the narrator painfully acknowledges her
father’s feverish distribution of ice grips as an
attempt in his ‘‘last winter’’ to ‘‘... be welcomed
and useful— /... Not to be sent alone over the
black ice.’’ In ‘‘The Garden,’’ the speaker pities
the wealthy, good-mannered, defiant woman
who spends her life alone working three garden-
ers around the clock to keep ‘‘the wilderness at
bay.’’ In the end, this self-sufficient matron terri-
fyingly discovers her wasted effort and struggle
and loss—‘‘how powerless she was /... like the
least of us grew old and weedy. / Felt her mind
crumble... / Heard the trees thicken as they
stumbled toward her / And set their cracking
weight upon her bones.’’
To Oliver, the reconciliation of man’s desire
for immortality and his experience of mortality
depends on his willingness to recognize them
as polarities. According to A. Poulin, Jr., the
essential tension between them in Oliver’s poetry
‘‘...defines the boundaries of all experience—
whether in the physical world, in the realm of
human relationships, or in the self.’’ In her
poems, she equates this reconciliation with the
very sense of connectedness she celebrates in
Twelve Moons, a unity existing between the
human and natural worlds. Through a personal
psychic journey, man must deny and eliminate the
self-conscious ‘‘I’’ that seeks immortality and
open his sensual perception to the mortal kinship
between the human and the natural.
In ‘‘Entering the Kingdom,’’ the narrator
expresses her desire to negate the ‘‘I’’ and become
one with nature—‘‘the dream of my life / Is to lie
down by a slow river / And stare at the light in the
trees— / To learn something of being nothing / A
little while but the rich / Lens of attention.’’ In
‘‘Blackleaf Swamp,’’ she asks whether being
human negates her being ‘‘part bird, part beast’’
and queries if so, ‘‘... why does a wing in the air /
Sweep against my blood / Like a sharp oar?’’
After her study of ‘‘darkness and trees and
water,’’ she confidently concludes that such self-
less communion with nature ‘‘feels like the love of
my mother.’’ In ‘‘The Plum Trees,’’ as the poetic
persona explores the sensual inundation of eating
summer plums, she celebrates the ‘‘sensibility’’ orThe Black Snake