Poem for My Father's Ghost (Mary Oliver)

Now is my father

A traveler, like all the bold men

He talked of, endlessly

And with boundless admiration,

Over the supper table,

Or gazing up from his white pillow –

Book on his lap, always, until

Even that grew too heavy to hold.

Now is my father free of all binding fevers

Now is my father

Traveling where there is no road

Finally, he could not lift a hand

To cover his eyes.

Now he climbs to the eye of the river,

He strides through the Dakotas,

He disappears into the mountains.

And though he looks

Cold and hungry as any man

At the end of a questing season,

He is one of them now: 

He cannot be stopped.

Now is my father

Walking the wind,

Sniffing the deep Pacific

That begins at the end of the world.

Vanished from us utterly,

Now is my father circling the deepest forest –

Then turning in to the last red campfire burning

In the final hills,

Where chieftains, warriors and heroes

Rise and make him welcome,

Recognizing, under the shambles of his body,

A brother who has walked his thousand miles.

--Mary Oliver, Poem for My Father’s Ghost     

Written after his death, this poem, an elegy to Oliver’s father is, in the words of Matthew Gindin, a poem whose shattering generosity – given that Oliver’s father sexually abused her when she was a child – can produce nothing but a kind of stunned reverence.  Perhaps this could serve as a reminder to us that love can and does conquer all...

In November we remember all souls...

Image source:  https://www.rbth.com/society/2015/12/03/dead-man-walking-in-kamchatka-forest_547067

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