See For Yourself - May 15 2026

 

See For Yourself

May 15 2026

    Pay attention.

    Be astonished.

    Tell about it.*

I try to pay attention;

attending to things

and bearing the cost.

Because there’s only so much I can afford

in my one precious life.

Mary Oliver exhorted us

to be astonished as well.

But it’s hard to go through life

in a constant state of astonishment.

Easy when you’re young,

not so much

when you’ve lived long enough

to become jaded and cynical

or simply bored.

Distractions tempt me.

Attention thieves

try to take more than I can give.

Anxiety

and the dire state of the world

rob me of focus.

So I narrow my gaze

and work at being intentional. 

After all, it’s spring

and life’s reawakening.

The air is sharp

with the loamy smell

of freshly thawed earth,

birds sing

when the first hint of dawn

has barely softened the sky,

and squirrels squabble over who-knows-what

after their long winter torpor

of blessed quiet.

  . . . But then, aren’t they always bad-tempered

in their short frenetic lives?

Nattering incessantly

as they dash through the trees.

Taking pleasure

in tormenting the dogs,

cat-calling

from their lofty perches

like hecklers at a wrestling match.

And pilfering food

distrustful neighbours

have surreptitiously cached.

I squish and squelch over soggy ground

skirting the really wet spots.

Pause

and take a slow deep breath.

The sun is high

and the trees, still bare, cast short shadows.

Buds, set last fall, are tightly furled;

too cold a spring

to have yet leafed out.

There are fresh scars

where winter culled the weak branches

and took out the dead.

I crane my neck,

narrowing my eyes

to make out the high ones,

etched against

a brightly rinsed sky.

“Sky-blue”, I want to say;

not because I’m at a loss

but because presence is everything,

and words — at best — approximate

so why even try?

Which even a poet

as fine as Mary Oliver

might say;

for me to truly tell

you must look up

and see for yourself.

*Mary Oliver wrote this — when she was 80 — in a poem called Instruction for Living a Life:  wisdom, informed by age. Three basic things (basic, but maybe not “simple”, as I initially wrote), and exactly what a good poet does. If only I could write something so restrained, so tight, and so perfectly crystallized!

I also paid homage to (a nice way to say “stole from”!) Mary Oliver when I wrote in my one precious life (5th line). I think this sentence, with which she ends the poem The Summer Day, is her most well known: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?