Honey to the Ear

As recent posts may have indicated, I am in the mood for poetry. And today, having run across a most beautiful piece by one of my favorite poets, I felt obliged to share it here.

Vultures

Like large dark
lazy
butterflies they sweep over
the glades looking
for death,
to eat it,
to make it vanish,
to make of it the miracle:
resurrection. No one
knows how many
they are who daily
minister so to the grassy
miles, no one
counts how many bodies
they discover
and descend to, demonstrating
each time the earth’s
appetite, the unending
waterfalls of change.
No one,
moreover,
wants to ponder it,
how it will be
to feel the blood cool,
shapeliness dissolve.
Locked into
the blaze of our own bodies
we watch them
wheeling and drifting, we
honor them and we
loathe them,
however wise the doctrine,
however magnificent the cycles,
however ultimately sweet
the huddle of death to fuel
those powerful wings.

– Mary Oliver

Storm Sunset

A few days ago a small thunderstorm swept through the area to my West and put on quite a show. I enjoy non-destructive thunderstorms – have since I was a kid – and seeing them from a couple miles away allows for some fantastic viewing. Feeding off the late afternoon heat, the storm boiled into the sky and passed near enough to drive me indoors with rain. With sunset in full gear and the rain easing off, I walked to a small clearing near the house and watched as the storm tracked neatly to the South leaving a perfectly clear sky behind.

I should have taken my camera, but once the show got started I wasn’t about to leave. Nature offers few intermissions. As the sun slid over the horizon of trees and hills to the West and the thunderstorm edged away South, rays of light caught the upper portions of the stormclouds and painted them gold. The lower clouds faded from orange and red to maroon and gray with a beauty and sublety that fixed me in place. Occasional flickers of lightning brightened the main cloud column. Evening mist – steam – filled the rambling valley I overlooked and a crescent moon finished the masterpiece of land and sky in a bright sliver against the deepening blues of coming night. Only a madman would have left to fetch a camera.

It would have been beautiful on film, no doubt, a stunning photo of summer evening, but paper and pixels could never do it justice. There are some things that eyes need to see for themselves, that hands need to feel and lungs need breathe. How do you accurately describe the taste of a ripe peach? Words, visuals, images only go so far.

So I stood in rain-peppered awe following the storm’s southerly push and the sun’s splendid farewell until color had faded from the uppermost tip of the anvil cloud and the moon ruled the dark sky. It was so beautiful. At times like that I feel filled with child-like wonder, as if some part of the world were suddenly new again and I got to experience it first-hand.

I suppose in a way it was. Every day is new. Every living thing grows and changes. Non-living things are acted upon and altered. It is an ever-shifting world so, yes, I suppose every thing is always just a little bit new.

I find that unspeakably encouraging.

Of Beauty and Butterflies

I went hiking the other day. It was breezy but warm and the nicest day we’d had for a stretch, and I wanted to get out and enjoy it. So I went to a bit of national woods not far away and walked a trail I’ve been through several times but had not visited in years. Much was the same, of course, and much was different.

An ice storm this winter hit the area hard. The trail often diverted from its original route to bypass tangles of downed trees and even where it did not divert there were colonies of stumps wearing skirts of sawdust. Some of the oldest trees in the area lay on the ground in cross-crossing lines with their roots in the air. It was almost painful to walk through. But there were protected areas, pristine little pockets behind hillsides and sweeping ridgelines, sheltered from the wind that accompanied the ice and caused most of the damage. In one of these pockets I stopped to rest.

A large shelf of rock spotted with mosses and lichens ran exposed through a narrow meadow-like opening on the steep hillside. It made an excellent seat. Surrounded by oak and pine, cedar and hickory, it was perfectly calm and flooded with warm mid-day sunshine. A small bronze-colored lizard with long dark stripes peeked out from under a tiny overhang in the rock that I hadn’t even noticed beforehand but vanished when I finally had to shift on my stone seat. A large patch of wildflowers swarmed the lower end of the clearing where the shelf of rock melted back into dark earth, violets and sheep shire, buttercups and phlox, false garlic and bluets scattered on the ground like confetti. Among their bright blooms, which drifted into the woods amid lazy sunbeams like something straight out of a Thomas Kincade painting, a few little butterflies hovered and flitted. Some were solid yellow, others colorfully spotted, and the smallest of them were white with orange piping at the edges of their wings. They tasted this blossom, then that one, seemingly unable to choose a favorite, dancing from one spring buffet to the next.

“They get to live their whole lives here,” I mused. “All they will ever know is this tiny paradise.”

I envied them. Beautiful and perfect, they danced on air. Their lives were short but enchanted, if only for one untainted afternoon. But, then, so was mine. I sighed and moved on, climbing farther and farther up the hilll until the trail broke out of the woods and wound the narrow edge of a bluff high above the crystal clear creek I had left just below the parking area. It was a lovely vista, a wide panorama of the creek valley and hills beyond, all broken ranges and steep hollows just beginning to don the golden-green cloak of spring. Redbuds flamed in purple brilliance and dogwoods floated like drifts of snow in the trees. I tried to soak it in, memorize every wrinkle of the hills, every sharp edge of rimrock, every curve of the creek so I could pull the memory out for later use and relive the simple glory of stillness and spring on a rocky bluff outcrop. I think I managed pretty well.

So now, even on long dark days when the sun does not shine for me, I can recall these memories and cling to the knowledge that it is not only butterflies who dance in the air and lead lives full of beauty.