Farewell, Mary Oliver, a poet whose name you may not know, but whose words you most certainly do

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely

The world offers itself to your imagination,

Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

When news of Mary Oliver's death came Thursday, those lines from her poem "Wild Geese" rose out of my memory like startled birds, and they've been fluttering around my brain ever since.

Oliver was a poet, maybe the best known and most quoted living poet of our time until she died Thursday, at home in Florida, at the age of 83. Even if you don't read poetry, you may have encountered her.

Oliver's words have found their way onto greeting cards and refrigerator magnets, into birthday parties and eulogies.

Search for her online and you'll find T-shirts and wall art emblazoned with her most famous line ("Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"); jewelry that quotes another well-known line ("I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings"); and assorted other commodities that poach her words and put them on the market.

Many of those products are labeled "inspirational," but don't be fooled. That overused word doesn't do her justice.

Oliver's poems do speak to our spirits, but they have a dark, contemplative aspect that transcends pop culture inspiration, which is why they're imprinted on so many minds as well as on coffee mugs.

All over social media Thursday, celebrities and ordinary people were sharing their favorite Mary Oliver poem. What was striking was how many poems were invoked.

"Wild Geese," the poem I opened this column with, was my mother's favorite. If I had to name mine, it would be "In Blackwater Woods," which ends by describing the three things we must learn to do to live in 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.

A friend introduced me to that poem after my mother died, and it was the perfect consolation.

I've always read Oliver's work more as consolation than inspiration. Her poems ask us to reflect on the violence and beauty of the world, on our inevitable loneliness and death, on the exhilarating but not entirely happy mystery of it all.

For years I kept her poem "I Worried" tacked above my desk:

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Every time I'd stop to read it, the poem's conclusion — that the worry had come to nothing, that it was better to go outside and sing — felt like a gentle pat on the back, not from someone who had overcome worry but who knew how to find brief relief.

Oliver won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and yet still some critics sniffed. Her poems were so, shudder, simple.

(Dear Lord, please save us from poems we can understand and remember and enjoy!)

"Devotions" by Mary Oliver, Penguin, 480 pages, $30

For more than half a century, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver has been training her eye on the mysterious and mystical thrumming of the divine. She sets out on a hike through the woods and suddenly she is asking questions, posing possibilities...

Oliver sometimes wrote about prayer, not dogmatically but in a way that invites readers to contemplate our cosmic position. She began one poem with the lines "I don't know where prayers go, or what they do." Her openness to uncertainty was part of her appeal.

And reading her poems could feel like a form of praying. She worshipped nature. She preached it. She wrote of grasshoppers and bears and butterflies and irises. One of her repeated messages was that the cure to what ails us is to go outside and look around.

See the grass, the trees, the sky. Take the time to notice. Marvel. As she wrote in her poem "Praying":

Just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don't try to make them elaborate.

This isn't a contest but the doorway into thanks. A silence in which another voice may speak.

Good advice for writing as well as for praying.

Oliver's writing was a prayer we could share. It still is, even though she's gone. Her reckoning with mortality has helped us reckon with our own, and that's no simple achievement.

She leaves us with these words:

When it's over, I want to say all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

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Previously:
• 09/06/18: A breeze of hope blows in the Windy City
• 08/29/18: Another summer. Again, a gift
• 08/17/18: In search of family in a small-town graveyard
• 08/09/18: Courage, kindness two years after 12-year-old blackboy was shot in Chicago
• 07/26/18: An everyday encounter made brighter by a good question: 'Do you have a story for me?'
• 06/19/18: A Big Sister's Guide to Life: Don't chase men and other practical advice
• 06/12/18: For 13 years, 2 friends wrote letters daily. It was a love affair of poetry, separated only by death.
• 06/01/18: What would we do without our brothers?
• 05/17/18: Forget a fiddler. City woman awakens to find a goose on her roof --- and laws about removing it and her eggs
• 05/10/18: A high school senior with college dreams was paralyzed by gunfire. Two years later, he's still pushing forward
• 04/05/18: Remembering the youngest history makers
• 04/03/18: The Parable of the (Expletive Deleted) Comfort Dog
• 02/15/18: Fees, fines, loans, scams: How the poor get poorer
• 02/01/18: When Paul Simon, Daniel Day-Lewis and Elton John say 'farewell' to work they love, should we too?
• 01/25/18: At Oscars time, let's snub the snubbing
• 12/28/17: The real 2017 word of the year
• 12/20/17: The laundry-folding robots are coming
• 12/13/17: How not to waste the last days of 2017