by Tess McLafferty
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
– Mary Oliver, The Summer Day
The ocean has begun her acceptance of light again, turning into the sparkling blue characteristic of Maine summers. The magnolias have returned from hibernation, the garden hydrangeas have begun opening themselves to onlookers, and the irises sprout from once frost-covered fields. Maine has begun waking up.
“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention,” Mary Oliver wrote in her sensational 1990 poem, The Summer Day. It seems that this is exactly what the season asks of us. Exiting my house, I meander down sidewalks: passing kids on lilac tricycles going too fast for jogging fathers to keep up, neighbors tending their gardens like reverent lovers, newly engaged couples headed down to the restaurant docks to take pictures under the setting sun. Like the natural world, us humans seem to have come out from hibernation, a treat those in the Northeast know is long-awaited. The summer days, which were once whispered around fireplaces, whose plans were discussed while wearing three layers of wool socks, are now here and alive, evident in the blooming world outside our front door.
“This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready/ to break my heart/ as the sun rises,/ as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers…the flowers bend their bright bodies,/ and tip their fragrance to the air,/ and rise,/ their red stems holding/ all that dampness and recklessness,/ gladly and lightly/ and there it is again—/ beauty the brave, the exemplary,” Oliver describes in Peonies. A scene that seems no further from me than our garden out front. As is the case in most of Mary Oliver’s poems, the natural world is revered in an intimate way, in a way accessible to anyone who will venture out and into it.
While growing up in Ohio, Mary Oliver spent a large portion of her life in the Northeast of the United States. Whether working in Austerlitz, New York, teaching at Bennington College, or settling down in Provincetown with her partner, Mary Oliver has shown the world that while she may not have been born on the East Coast, she has explored its reaches more so than many who were. It is no wonder that her writing reflects this. “When I am among the trees/ especially the willows and the honeylocust,/ equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,/ they give off such hints of gladness./ I would almost say they save me, and daily.” These lines of Oliver’s When I Am Among the Trees can be pinned to many places on a U.S. map. However, while wandering the many trails that unfurl beneath dense clusters of pines, basking under a willow tree by the river, and climbing the mountain faces hidden under the state’s towering oaks, one feels Mary Oliver’s words poignantly in the heart of Maine. One understands how an Ohio girl became a Northeast local: she understood that to get to the heart of a place, one must understand its wildlife.
Peeling my body away from my bed, I ignore the shrill of my alarm clock for one second longer. Long enough to move my burlap curtains and make way for the sun and “his old, buttery fingers” to dance across my bedspread, my wood floors— any surface that he can find. Walking around Fort Foster later that morning, one of the state’s many parks that blends the line between forest and sea, I enter Mary Oliver’s world once again. Flowers and weeds and all the in between seem to “bend their bright bodies” in a permanent path made by the spray of the Atlantic, continuing to “tip their fragrance to the air” in the path of the breeze. I may never make my way to church today, may never “know exactly what a prayer is,” but as Oliver and her poems oozing in adoration beg me to do, I have paid attention. An act that “saves me daily,” too. It seems that living in Maine is simply living in an Oliver poem— one where nature joins in the poet’s silent plea for me to notice.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” Oliver finishes The Summer Day by writing. Many readers, and future tattoo-goers especially, focus on this line, on the call to spend our precious lives well. However, without journeying through the poem at large, without reading Oliver’s preceding discussion of falling into tall grass, spending her days transfixed in admiration of a grasshopper or a honeylocust, I fear one would miss the point. Like exiting my house in Maine with headphones, walking through the park with a destination and no peripheral vision, I fear one would miss the noticing that seems to underpin her meaning.
Yes, the thought of our one wild life can be a grand and terrifying thing, one to be reminded of in its preciousness. However, maybe Mary Oliver did not mean to terrify or have anyone find sole meaning in the last line. Maybe The Summer Day, and all her poems that exist around it, were meant to give an idea of what to do with said precious life: to do less and exist more. Maybe, as the world cracks open this summer, as Maine is painted in peach sunsets and blooms of hydrangeas, the noticing is prayer enough.
Tess McLafferty is a former intern at Literary Traveler. She studied Sociology at NYU with minors in Creative Writing and Art History. As a strong proponent of learning about the world through travel, Tess has studied abroad in Prague and in London and Sydney. Her passions include baking, photography, hiking with her golden retriever, and poetry, the latter of which she has published in undergraduate journals such as Baedeker Travel Magazine, The Gallatin Review, and The Weasel, as well as her personal substack.
