Everyday Canvas

Just Right, While Reading Mary Oliver

Prompt: Have you ever had a "Goldilocks" experience? It took you three tries to get it just right?

-----

As I have a few decades on me, I don’t think I got anything just right, as the “just right” criterion is a changeable one, depending on the century, decade, year, and flavor of the times. For that reason, let’s rename “just right” as “acceptable.”

Aside from the semantics, it may take me more or—if I am lucky--less than three tries to let anything turn out satisfactory enough for me not to play with it anymore. For example, yesterday I baked a pumpkin cake. It was all right, I guess, because hubby loved it, but in hindsight, I want to add to it walnuts and raisins. That will be for the next time I bake it. Then, who knows, I may even add pickles to it. No, just kidding. Pickles won’t do, but the thought of them in a cake was amusing to me.

Fact is, I never counted the number of tries for anything I muddied my hands to make. Probably because, I don’t have golden locks but plain black hair, now turned grey, which is turning to white. But then, when my hair turns all white, it will be three tries, won’t it?

====================

Reading Mary Oliver

Now that April is near, *hint, hint!*, I started trying to inspire my ever-so-maladroit poetry muse. Who else can I read but Mary Oliver for that purpose, as I have always admired her seemingly simple but subtle and poignant diction and lyricism taking off from the imagery of the nature around her. It was only fair that she won the Pulitzer and other prestigious awards.

I have in my hand the small volume, Why I Wake up Early, new to me because I have it only since Saturday, but I have a few of her books, also. Inside the volume in my hand, I love all but especially, Breakage, Snow Geese, and Many Miles. This will change of course for each time I read her, since I'll be thinking that, at that moment, I love the poem I am reading the most.

Still, one of my most favorite poems of hers is When Death Comes, although her poems of appreciation for what is in the nature, I also adore.

Here is: When Death Comes
(I can post it here because it is all over the net, anyway.)

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox:

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.