A conversation on the walk home from work has me thinking about… well, I don’t know what. But this other poem, prose, & praise from late April is close to it.
Photo by Larry D James
The Kingfisher
The Kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water—hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don’t say he’s right. Neither
do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.
~ Mary Oliver ~
That poem, which needs no commentary, came to mind reading Barbara Kingsolver’s essay “Seeing Scarlet” this afternoon. She describes a trip in Costa Rica to catch a rare glimpse of a scarlet macaw in the wild—uncaged and, therefore, more truly seen.
As we climbed into the Talamanca Highlands on a pitted, serpentine highway, the forest veiled the new ahead but always promised something around the next bend. We were two days south of San José, in a land where birds lived up to the extravagance of their names: purple-throated mountain gems, long-tailed silky flycatchers, scintillant hummingbirds. At dawn we’d witnessed the red-green fireworks of a resplendent quetzal as he burst from his nest cavity, trailing his tail-feather streamers. But there’d been no trace of scarlet yet, save for the scarlet-thighed dacnis (yes, just thighs—not his feet or lower legs). Having navigated through an eerie morning mist in an elfin cloud forest, we found ourselves at noon among the apple orchards on slopes so steep as to make the trees seem flung there instead of planted.
[…]
On the river safe and sound, with the Golfo Dulce a steady blue horizon on our left, we rattled on southward through small fincas under the gaze of zebu cattle with their worldly wattles and huge downcast ears. Between farms the road was shaded by unmanicured woodlots, oil-palm groves, and the startling monoculture of orchard-row forests planted for pulp. The dark little feathered forms of seedeaters and grassquits lined the top of wires of fences like intermittent commas in a run-on sentence. To give our jostled bones and jeep a break, we stopped often; any bird was a good enough excuse. A dark funnel cloud swirling above a field turned out to be a vast swarm of turkey- and black vultures. With our binoculars we scanned the vortex down to its primogenitor: a dead cow, offering itself up for direct recycling back into the food chain. Most of the peninsula’s airborne scavengers, it seemed, had just arrived for dinner. Angling for position, near the carcass, two king vultures flapped their regal black and white wings and rainbow-colored heads at each other. “Wow, amazing, gorgeous!” we muttered reverently, gawking through our binoculars, setting new highs in vulture admiration.
I’m not sure vultures are ever as attractive as macaws, or do anything as perfectly as a kingfisher, but there is something in the awe even of predators and scavengers. If I had it in front of me I would add a picture I have somewhere at home, of the first I recall ever admiring a vulture. It was on a hike Pennsylvania several years ago, and two black vultures landed like helicopters barely more than an arm’s length away from where I was sitting on a cliff. I couldn’t tell you now if I felt at home in that moment or completely out of place.
One of the reasons I’m so enjoying Wiman’s Joy anthology is because I keep finding fresh ways that it—the theme broadly and the poems specifically—points such a paradoxically direct finger at that question that I keep circling around: How do I remain academic while simultaneously trying to break the didactic hold on so much of life and faith? (“For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven / From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.”)
I’ve been reading (slowly and very intermittently) a book with my pastor by Esther Meek called Longing to Know. Meek’s basic goal is to expand on one key sentence, largely derived from her dissertation on the Hungarian chemist-philosopher Michael Polanyi: “Knowing is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality.” A loaded sentence, for sure. But one thing it necessarily means—and this fact is what has driven me to people like Polanyi and Meek and Wiman (and Jesus)—is that much of life consists of and abides within the ineffable.
Thus, Frederick Buechner:
And the answer that she could not have heard even if I had given it was that it was not an idea at all, neither my own nor anyone else’s. It was a lump in the throat. It was an itching in the feet. It was a stirring in the blood at the sound of rain. It was a sickening of the heart at the sight of misery. It was a clamoring of ghosts. It was a name which, when I wrote it out in a dream, I knew it was a name worth dying for even if I was not brave enough to do the dying myself and could not even name the name for sure. Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you a high and driving peace. I will condemn you to death.
I’m not ready to tackle those last two sentences. (Is there something in that high and driving peace and death that’s necessarily and inexplicably bound up in the just-out-of-reach lump, itching, stirring?) But there is something indescribable, ungraspable, and always elusive that is yet no less real for its mystery or its secrecy, and maybe more real just because of it. (And no less alive for the death it brings?)
I was doing some reading for a discussion in class last week and took a quote from another of Wiman’s books, Ambition and Survival:
Some knowledge must be partial in order to be knowledge, the poem tells us, and there are experiences we can only have if we never quite have them.
There’s something oddly complete in the partial and the never-quite. Maybe it’s something like the view of a wild, uncaged scarlet macaw; and maybe it’s better—maybe it’s always better left implied, pointed at. Though Wiman was commenting on Thomas Hardy’s “The Shadow on the Stone,” he could just as easily have been commenting on a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which he has quoted often and which, along with the book itself, may very nearly capture the paradox:
For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is the foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.