Past the Stile of Stars (Elegy for Mary Oliver)

Midsummer afternoon –
airy aisles weave and thread through the plum trees.
Pen in hand, I walk the lawn through an errant sprinkler,
the blue sky so vacantly weightless
a rainbow barely appears.

The hotness of midday has stopped all the clocks,
a chink in the hyaline hologram letting
a bone-white and liquid shimmer of death lazily through.
So very close and unreachable,
and now, on the other side, you.

Oh dear, dear Mary, I was going to write you a letter,
make sure I did it before you died.
Was going to tell you how
the things you’d made made my sight of the world more tender,
made my sight of the world more restless.

The way your words drew my hands down closer to the earth
brushing palms on rough bark,
running casuarinas through my fingers,
tracing sedges, grasping
smooth greengage branches to steady my fears.

You remembered to me how to welcome delight and
open my mouth and my heart without flinching to sorrow –
lift my pen for the self-evident and usual and shabby even.
Lift my sleep-sodden body sometimes to meet the dawn
though I’d rather the night.

I want to honour your scribbling stride,
past the birds, the stems, the lucid skies which strewed
for you such holiness, past stamens of sleeping
anther and filament, lush moss, past scented
petals unfolding without guile or years.

Orion tonight in the air drawing my eyes with his
three-star belt and shimmering bow
can not outshine your signposts on their
rocky outcrops and in grassy rustling fields,
pointing the way
where to? I step out anyway –

my eyes, my pen now following you past the stile of stars,
following you who maintained the child’s
faith to the end of your crone’s hours,
watching you go as you step into the temple
carrying wonder and wildflowers.