The Poet with His Face in His Hands by Mary Oliver
The Poet with His Face in His Hands
Mary OliverYou want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself acrossthe forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheetslike crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all youwant and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touchedby the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.
MARGINALIA
Irrational fit of anger. I have a temper, I know that. I try to curb it often, because I know how to drive people away. I can say very cruel things at the heat of the moment, but the difference between me and those who are kind is that I do mean them. Days after I still mean them. It’s not a pretty sight, and it’s a side of me that I am not altogether proud of. But the beast exists. All precautions must be made in order to keep it hidden, because it cannot be tamed.
Tonight I have been unsuccessful. It has reared its ugly head. The anger has been brewing for a few days now. I felt its current under my skin. I should’ve seen it coming. I thought I had it under control. All that rage. Now my heart is pounding in my chest; the beast is heaving, breathing hard. I didn’t have the most eloquent of words but I didn’t let that stop me, did I. Nobody won the argument. I’m not always looking for victory. Sometimes I just want to hurt. Sometimes I’m just spoiling for a fight. I think I got it tonight, though I was surprised at the ferocity and how quickly things progressed. It’s disgusting. I’m disgusting. When poems talk about people who are difficult to love, is this what they meant?
ABOUT MARY OLIVER
Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Oliver’s poetry won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement. Her last books included A Thousand Mornings (2012), Dog Songs (2013), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015), Upstream: Selected Essays (2016), and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017). Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound,… (more)
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ENDNOTES
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Tony Pargeter
Anger is a valid part of our emotional repertoire and so deserves acknowledgement and respect as such. Venting it can not only be rare truth and pure self-expression, it can also clear long-held obfuscation and murk in relationships. We are SO taught to live “at a remove” from our most intense emotions because they make other people uncomfortable, but meanwhile it’s one reason we read books, watch movies and listen to music, to experience the power of anger vicariously. Such hypocrisy really….