Mary, Mary, Mary

“...many times late at night I was 

to see Ultima returning from the 

llano where she gathered the herbs 

that can be harvested only in the 

light of the full moon by the careful 

hands of a curandera.”-Antonio in Bless Me, Ultima Rudolfo Anaya

A friend, Mary Symer, first introduced me to the poetry of Mary Oliver.  She patiently hand -copied a number of Oliver's poems and others into a small chapbook, written on spirit papers. Also known as ghost money or Joss papers, this paper is primarily used/burned as an offering to ancestors in China and Vietnam. Artists like it for aesthetic reasons and so this booklet I have treasured, a perfect going away gift for my departure from New Mexico and return to the eastern seaboard in 1996, (near to Oliver's current home) seems to hold within it's pages so much. Both life, death and like the moon's phases, a reflecting light one can hold in hand.  

It would be many years later after I received this booklet of poems before I discovered that Ms. Oliver and I both come from the same part of Ohio.  Although we grew up in different eras- she had already moved to New York before I was born- I like knowing we stepped through the same surroundings and shared landscapes. Easily, I love her words, her way with words.  She writes about all that I hold dear about the nature of nature with such depth and meaning.  For instance, most of us tend to speak of moonlight in timeworn ways, a modern condition I imagine brought on by our paled experience of the night sky in urban areas.  Not so Mary Oliver. In her book of poems, Twelve Moons, she writes about full moons in so many sacred ways: of the Pink Moon, the Wolf Moon, the Flower Moon.  On it's thin pages, a richness of wording for each of the full moons of the year, Ice in February, Strawberry in June. This book contains the wonderment of a fawn too new; a story of two turtles embracing; a mother bear under a snow moon giving birth, "she nibbled them with teeth like white tusks; she curled down beside them like a horizon." And there is a fish climbing from the sea as moonlight blazes black rocks.   

The moon in any phase that we see in the evening sky, is a massive reflector, bouncing the light of the sun back to us.  Isn’t there something so beautiful in this night- light shining upon us as a metaphor of receiving and giving back light?  Consider the moon, this planet of our familiar, as a daily reminder of our human and more-than- human* cycles, our own phases of radiance and veiled expressions. Of course the entirety of the moon is always there but we usually see just the portion that is sunlit. Often it appears to our eyes that the rest of the moon has been curiously carved away and made invisible. My personal favorite phase of the moon is the thin crescent two days after the new moon when it appears to be a silvery sliver among the stars.   It is perhaps most enchanting when on rare occasions it sits on it’s side - a cradle in the heavens, a smile in the sky.  This is the moon that the Virgin of Guadalupe stands upon: the horned moon.  She is Mary of the evening, her mantle covered with stars, her feet planted firmly along the curve of the moon, held up by an angel.  And so tonight , as we approach the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year,  I take pause as I write these words to look out and see if I might find the rising moon peeking pink over the mountain crest. And I stop to thank these three wise Marys for guiding my way through the darkness of the llano, the "funnel of the night," with your words of light. 

Cold Moon-Hannah's Children

They will come in their own time, 

Probably in the black

Funnel of the night,

And probably in secret-

No one will see

Their marvelous coming

But the goats,

And Maple the pony.

Now, on the evening 

Of the last counted day,

We latch the stable door.

As the white moon rises

She settles to her knees.

Her curious yellow eyes--

Old as the stones

Of Greece, of the mountains

That were born with the world-

Look at us in friendship,

And then look away,

Inward.  Inward

To the sacred groves.

-From Twelve Moons by Mary Oliver

 See this smiling cresecent moon on the evening of January 13-14, 2013

* and thank you David Abram for the borrowed term: more-than-human