I feel loose and free and jazzy and Sunday morning in church I fell apart, which is unusual for an old stoic, but the choir sang, “We shall walk through the valley in peace. I am 79, and this year is a fine year and I’m not just whistling past the graveyard. An old man must choose his vices carefully and I gave up smoking and drinking when the thrill was gone but if I were offered a Last Meal the night before I swing from the gallows, steak and eggs would be it and possibly (why not?) a glass of Pinot Noir, robust but subtle, moderate tannins, floral aroma, notes of cherry and plum with a slight rhubarb accent, otherwise a bottle of Grain Belt. I’ve been skipping the news about Senator Colon Gas of West Virginia lately and his objections to reducing greenhouse gases and I’ve been focused on the pleasures of being an old man, which includes the occasional steak-and-eggs breakfast. I much prefer talking to you than listening for intruders. Had I made the enormous mistake of buying myself a dog, I might’ve been comfortable in isolation and I’d still be there today, a cranky bachelor, unvaccinated, not brushing its teeth or my own, listening to Fox, with twenty “Keep Out” signs posted, a pile of hundreds of empty Jack Daniels bottles, and a couple of loaded AK-47s by the door. She is a daily walker but prefers Central Park with its great variety of humanity. Sorry, I’m a money writer.Īnd then I met my friend who became my lover and she was a New Yorker and I abandoned the cabin and workroom and we married in 1995. A porcupine is interesting for a few minutes and maybe if I were looking up at the stars and smelling apples as someone played the piano and a porcupine put his nose in my hand, I could get a poem out of it, but poetry isn’t my line. And after a year I concluded that peace and quiet made me uneasy. I was working on a book, The Book of Guys, and none of the guys was a hunter or hermit or forest ranger. I am not Mary Oliver, however, and don’t have the patience to think about a porcupine and design a poem around him (or her, I also don’t recognize gender except for deer), and I am not a birdwatcher. Shocking once, when a porcupine stopped and looked up at me. I sat at a table looking out the window and it was startling, when a deer walked out of the underbrush or a bird flew by. Once I got myself a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin with a separate workroom, 10×15, on stilts, with a stove and a big window looking into the trees, no house or road in sight. I don’t think I’ve been loud often in my life, but I’ve certainly been stupid. Years later, I’m sitting in a steakhouse, hearing about brushing dogs’ teeth and thinking about Mary Oliver’s grasshopper while ten feet away eight drunks in their twenties sit around a table, having a wonderful time being stupid and very loud. Below the poem he notes that the word “racecar” is the same forward or backward.
He declined to draw any conclusion or to bring himself into the poem. It’s a sweet little souvenir of a September evening in 1954, north of Minneapolis, and a boy wanting to preserve the wonder of concurrence, the hymn, the stars, the apples, the dog’s cold wet nose. Night falls, the sky fills with the Milky Way.ĭishes are done, my dog’s nose in my hand. I came across an Oliveresque passage in a journal of mine from when I was 12, standing one September evening after dishes were done, behind our house, under my dad’s apple trees, and my mother at the piano playing “Abide with me” and I wrote:
The world offers itself to your imagination. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Unlike most poets working today, she doesn’t write about her own troubles. Paying attention is what Oliver does in her poetry, it’s what her poems are about, walking out in the natural world and seeing what’s there.
Meaning of story of my life song how to#
How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, Oliver carefully describes the grasshopper chewing and washing its face and flying away and then. He said he uses a finger pad with bristles and a beef-flavored toothpaste and the dogs tolerate it well and the brushing spares them dental miseries so it made sense. I gave it to a friend whose description of brushing his dogs’ teeth reminded me of Oliver’s description of a grasshopper sitting in her hand and eating sugar, the jaws moving side to side, not up and down. I’ve bought many copies of Mary Oliver’s poems, Devotions, and on Friday I gave away the last so now I’m ordering more.
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