Place Poem: "Spring Azures" by Mary Oliver
The new season is a gift that can — and must — get us up off the mat.
Have you also noticed that everything has been horrible lately? I assume that you have. I’ll also assume I don’t need to list off all the reasons everything is horrible. What I won’t assume is that everyone, or really anyone, is feeling motivated and mentally (spiritually, cosmically) healthy enough to get up off the mat and do something about it. Even the smallest dose of news these days is enough to send even the most strong-willed among us into a doom spiral. I know because I spent much of the day I’m writing this doing just that.
I haven’t dusted off a Mary Oliver poem around here in quite some time, but the need at this point is great enough that it’s unquestionably time. I also think that Oliver’s words are instructive (as they always are) in helping us find the versions of ourselves that are best-equipped to handle this moment and the moments to come:
“Spring Azures”
by Mary Oliver
In spring the blue azures bow down at the edges of shallow puddles to drink the black rain water. Then they rise and float away into the fields. Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy, and all the tricks my body knows― the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps, and the mind clicking and clicking— don’t seem enough to carry me through this world and I think: how I would like to have wings— blue ones— ribbons of flame. How I would like to open them, and rise from the black rain water. And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London—a boy staring through the window, when God came fluttering up. Of course, he screamed, and seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body leaning on the sill, and the thousand-faceted eyes. Well, who knows. Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window between him and the darkness. Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city— turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings, to a life of the imagination.
As the weather has warmed up and the world has sprung into bloom over the past couple of weeks, it’s had an intoxicating effect on my mood. I haven’t ever been diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I do know that springtime lifts me right up each year, and I also know I’m not the only one. Just when I don’t feel I take take another day of cold, stark (beautiful) winter, here come the tulips and irises to the rescue. Here come also the butterflies, including Oliver’s spring azures (Celastrina ladon), to flutter about and remind us that warmth hasn’t disappeared forever.
Just a glimpse of these treasures flips a switch in me that makes the day-to-day buffoonery of American politics just a bit easier to bear, and for that I am grateful. The butterflies Oliver cites in “Blue Azures” offer the narrator of the poem something similar; a set of blue wings, “ribbons of flame” to lift her out of the heaviness of her life, and the drudgeries and tragedies around her. How the narrator wishes (how we all wish) we could take flight and rise away from whatever her version of the “black rain water” is. We have our share of dark pools these days — grant cancellations, trade wars, and El Salvadoran gulags, to name a few — wouldn’t it be nice to float away?
But spring — especially Oliver’s conception of it in this and many, many other of her poems — can bring more than just “good vibes,” as the kids say. All the wonders and changes that come with the new season, for me, symbolize more than just the mere fact that the earth continues to turn on its axis and around the sun, comforting a thought though that is. Especially this year, I’ve found that getting outside and clocking every new and beautiful change that’s taking place is also helping me think differently about the vast horizon of problems we’re facing; how we might change them; and how we might add new color to the bleakness of the current situation.
The turn in “Blue Azures” to a scene with the English poet William Blake offers a different way of thinking about the fast approach of spring, and what a richer version of “taking flight” can really mean. In detailing Blake’s circumstances, “in the dirt and sweat of London,” Oliver relates a story Blake himself told about his 18th-century childhood: that he was staring out the window of his London apartment, and “beh[eld] God's face” in the window, an experience that lifted his soul and inspired a lifetime of work that would make him one of the central figures of the Romantic Era of art and poetry.
By including a bit of Blake’s tale, Oliver is reminding us that “taking flight” like the blue butterflies she observed on her daily walks with a notebook is not just an act of escape or survival; it’s a generative act of inspiration that can create new life and love that goes beyond just treading the “black rain water” of the troubled moment we’re in right now. This kind of flight means not just recognizing that a situation is unsatisfactory; it’s taking deliberate and drastic steps to meet the moment, solve it, and exceed it.
Witness, for example, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who proved with his 25-hour address on the floor of the U.S. Senate taking President Trump to task on a wide variety of ways in which he’s abused his office since taking the oath in January. Policies and political realities did not shift overnight because Booker made his speech; but it was still a gift to the majority of Americans out in the world who feel powerless to make a difference and want, if nothing else, physical evidence that somebody cares enough to stand up and refuse to eat or drink for an entire day in order to demonstrate how dire of a situation we’re in.
To me, Booker’s speech was a demonstration that “taking flight” can happen even while you’re technically powerless, or rooted in place. In Booker’s case, it happened because the rules of the Senate required him to root in place in order to make his point. He’s in the minority, he’s limited by the institution he’s a part of, and he knows the aid cuts and deportations will continue when his speech is over. But he does it anyway, because he can, and so others might be inspired to do their own equivalent.
Booker isn’t the only one. Spring seems to be helping a number of politicians and institutions locate their voice and emerge from the black rain water. In response to the grotesque press event Trump held in the Oval Office with the president of El Salvador yesterday — during which he mused about abducting not just legal residents of our country, but born-and-raised American citizens, to what amount to concentration camps — Booker’s Senate colleague, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, has pledged to go to El Salvador himself in an attempt to get more information and hopefully free one of his constituents who was sent to the gulag by mistake. Another Senate colleague, Bernie Sanders, is traveling the country with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as part of their “Fight Oligarchy” tour. As I write on Monday, the two are firing up crowds just down the road in Nampa, Idaho.
Other institutions, like Harvard University, are fighting back1 instead of complying in advance with the ridiculous demands Trump is making of them, willing to put billions of dollars at risk for the principle of academic freedom. I am sure there are a fair few in the Harvard community who question this move, who prefer comfortable stasis over colorful resistance; but what these folks don’t realize is that existential challenges like the ones we’re facing now are only solved through courage and imagination, the same high-flying tempers that send the butterflies into the woods, or that sent Blake into a poetic revolution.
I want to be clear here: this isn’t just about “sucking it up,” or “gritting our teeth and getting to it.” It’s about (first) finding the seasonal joys that are springing up all around us, harnessing them, and (second) letting them motivate the choices we make in our personal and public lives. The flowering and literal growth happening in my neighborhood and my backyard are beautiful developments by themselves, and they really are boosting my mood; but they’re also spiritual grist for the mill of how I can spend my precious time on this earth in a generative way.
This is a hard time, and it’s likely to continue in this way for awhile. Hunkering down and turning away is an understandable response. But even better is coming out of the winter cave, taking flight, and springing into action. May we all be ready to act when God (or whatever divine metaphor you prefer) “come[s] fluttering up” to inspire us out of despair.
Place Picks
It’s been a minute since I did some honest-to-god Place Picks, so here some are!
Music: “Day One” by Bon Iver (feat. Dijon and Flock of Dimes)
The musician Justin Vernon, better known by his stage name, Bon Iver, has been a central fixture of my listening experience since I was in college, which at this point was a distressingly long time ago. Vernon’s sonic spectrum spans the poles of his two mosts famous features: “Lost in the World”, a 2010 Kanye West electronica/hip-hop whirlwind; and Taylor Swift’s heartbreak piano ballad “Exile”, from her 2020 album folklore (I’ve not done the research to support this, but Vernon has to be one of the only people to make a guest appearance for both Kanye and Taylor, who of course are sworn enemies).
His most recent album, “SABLE, fABLE” was released this past Friday to pretty broad critical acclaim, and its timing couldn’t be more perfect. The caricature of Bon Iver and their work is that its middle-aged-white-guy melancholy at its finest; sad, slow acoustics, wailing vocals, and terribly depressing topics.
Not this one. Vernon has found love and is “taking flight” in his own musical way:
Vernon wrote Everything Is Peaceful Love, Fable’s centrepiece, in 2019. It has a beautifully silly chorus that crests like a sunrise: “Damn if I’m not climbing up a tree right now!” – childish ecstasy meeting the fear of what you do once you get that high. “It was almost like, I feel so good I don’t know what to do,” says Vernon. He wanted to harness that mood. “We put it on the wall to see what else gathered around it.”
There are so many songs I could have highlighted from this album, but “Day One” is my personal favorite. As the name implies, it made me want to wipe the slate totally clean, get up off the mat and start fresh. And if you enjoy the song as much as I do, you might also like the acapella version, which was featured as a poem in this week’s issue of the New Yorker.
News
“The hidden power of marathon Senate speeches” from The Conversation.
If you’re interested in learning more about the historical context behind Booker’s marathon speech, you can check out this article I wrote for The Conversation on what was unique about the speech (and what wasn’t). Or, for the more audio-inclined, you can listen to me talk through some of the finer points on 95bFM, a lovely New Zealand radio station that had me on the other day.
Books
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
If the butterfly metaphor spoke to you in Mary Oliver’s poem, then you’re bound to love Flight Behavior, a 2012 book by one of my very favorite writers, Barbara Kingsolver. It’s a heartrending, genuine portrait of Appalachia, the personal struggles that emerge in struggling places, and the unexpected ways in which we find and thrive in connections with the natural environment.
Podcasts
Mary Oliver — “I got saved by the beauty of the world”, from On Being with Krista Tippett
If today’s place poem left you wanting more of Mary Oliver (why wouldn’t it?) then I would strongly recommend this rare interview that the notoriously private poet gave with On Being back in 2015.
Luckily, Harvard has what we like to call “fuck you money,” which (for the uninitiated) usually refers to the amount of money needed before you can tell somebody powerful to go fuck themselves without facing repercussions.
It’s still very early spring here. But if the crocuses pushing through the snow can be brave, so can we.