A friend who died a year ago pointed me towards the poetry of Mary Oliver (1935-2019), America’s best-selling poet in 2007. My friend had chosen Oliver poems to be read at her funeral. She recommended me to buy Oliver’s collected poems, but I was put off by the price of the book.

But my friend knew about words and poems, and surely, I thought, there must be something admirable about the poems of the best-selling poet in America. Then I cam across In Blackwater Woods in an anthology, and I liked its simplicity, directness, celebration of nature, and, most of all, its conclusion of the three things we must do make it through this world: “to love what is mortal;/to hold it/against your bones knowing/your own life depends on it;/ and, when the time comes to let it go,/to let it go.”

The letting it go is the hardest part, which is perhaps why she repeats the advice.

I learn from Wikipedia that Oliver “found inspiration for her work in nature and had a lifelong habit of solitary walks in the wild. Her poetry is characterized by wonderment at the natural environment, vivid imagery, and unadorned language.” This poem was surely written after (or while on) a solitary walk and features “wonderment at the natural environment, vivid imagery, and unadorned language.”

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.