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Breakage

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cup of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred--
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the
--moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
--full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

-Mary Oliver, 2003

It seems like a million years ago that I started Wednesday poem day, although no accurate calendar would give you that number. An accurate calendar would say that I started Wednesday poem day a little over four years ago, and the ticker in the margin of this blog tells me that since then I've posted more than 200 poems. Which seems like a lot, but there is actually a surprising volume of poetry in the world, if you think about it.

There are days, I'll admit, when this starts to feel like this is something I do because anything else would be stopping, and the wheels of my life run in certain deep ruts. But then there are days when the thing I need in my life is a poem by Mary Oliver, and I have reason to pause and find one, read it slowly. My dad has a book of Mary Oliver's poems that I stole or borrowed when I went to college but before then, in high school, I used to go into the room in the front of the house where dad's books were, sit in Moose's chair, and read it. I remember this. I don't remember why I needed poems, then, just that I did. They fed and watered me.

I forget, until I remember again: this is not something I do without reason. Some habits have a quality of liturgy about them, and those are habits worth keeping. They pay unexpected dividends.