I’m not sure if this story I’m about to tell you is one of my more negative or positive learning experiences. It involves the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, a rainy night on Commercial Street in Provincetown and everything you miss when you don’t stay present.
Back in 1993, I was living in Portland, Oregon, finishing my last two years of college and writing tons of poetry and short stories. I submitted to every literary publication I could find. This was a welcome break while going to school full-time, working full-time while living in a cockroach-infested studio apartment and living off of ramen noodles and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. To feel in solidarity with my favorite writers and the totality of “struggle,” I taped my favorite poems on the insides of the kitchen’s empty cupboard doors. I typed into the night smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking coffee to keep the ideas flowing while the world was asleep.
Blackwater Pond
Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop and yes, Mary Oliver sang songs to me from the cupboards inspiring me to keep going. One of my favorite poems taped up was by Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods, a sacred place in the Province lands she wrote about often. The work (and the poetic inspiration) paid off. I was published in four literary magazines over the course of two years. My very first poem was dedicated to Mary Oliver.
Fast forward 10 years or so to that night I mentioned above on Commercial Street in Provincetown. I’ve driven to a Mary Oliver reading with a dear friend in a shiny white Porsche. We can’t find a place to park, we’re running, laughing hysterically in the rain, the talk has started, my friend knowing how much this night means to me walks as close to the front as she can pulling me, squeezing into open seats to stare Mary Oliver head on.
In my hand, in an envelope alongside a thank-you-for-being-you-Mary-Oliver is my name, phone number and that poem I mentioned above, the one for Mary Oliver. I see Mary’s lips moving, I hear her voice, but all I can think of is meeting her after, how much she is going to be flattered, she’ll of course want to take a walk with me around Blackwater Pond, to be interviewed for some Cape Cod publication I now write for. I don’t hear her read all my favorite poems. I am dreaming, I am nervous to meet her.
Blackwater Pond
After the reading, we all line up to shake her hand and say hello and when it’s my turn, I say to her “Hello, I wrote this poem and it was dedicated to you and it was my first published poem,” and I hand her the envelope.
She smiles and says “Well my goodness,” or something.
“…and I’d love to interview you for a story,” and right there and then her face changes, her body language tightens, she looks at me and says “I don’t DO interviews.”
I am dying a slow death in front of my favorite writer. I turn pale, people push past me and I keep standing there. My friend tries to console me. I just want to go home. We walk into the night and back into the rain and thankfully, nobody can tell I’m crying. It will take me a long time to process my feelings from a sort of shame to acknowledging immaturity, but I have learned a very important lesson. Be present. You might never get this chance again. And I didn’t. Mary Oliver sadly died in 2019.
This past weekend, I finally made it to Blackwater Pond. I don’t know why it took so long. It wasn’t hard to see why Mary Oliver would write about it. It really is a magic place filled with birch groves, shady pine overhangs, icicles hanging off moss, multicolored mushrooms, pine needle beds, sand dunes, basically everything you could want on a Cape Cod hike, minus the poet.
Blackwater Pond
I tell my husband I want to read this poem before we hike.
In Blackwater Woods
by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
And thanks to finding the time to finally take that walk, I did.
Got a Pond Story you want to share? Email Kristin Andres at [email protected]
Pond Stories are a collection of writings from Cape Codders and visitors who love the 1000 local ponds that dot the Cape. We hope this collection of stories, that are as much endearing as they are environmentally aware, will awaken your inner environmentalist to think deeper about our human impacts to these unique bodies of water. Check out these valuable resources to learn more about the current challenges Cape Cod ponds are facing and how you can be a better pond steward in your town.
