My first encounter with Mary Oliver was with that famous line from “Morning Poem,” ‘Every morning the world is created.’  It was one of the first poems I committed to memory, so it flashed for me, like a ‘quick lesson in creation’ (her line, from “Lightning”), just about every day.

Flashed: it lit something up for me. What it lit up exactly is hard to say. Something about the repetition of that phrase every morning. At a certain point something in me had sunk deep into the grain of the poem. I would find myself reciting that first line without even realizing it.

Soon, I noticed there are other every morning’s in her poetry. And then I noticed there are a handful of ‘everyday’s’, an ‘every night’, and just the other day I found an ‘every spring.’

I’m starting to wonder about this, about what sort of weight it carries beyond the literal signification, but I’m deliberately restraining from quick conclusions. The everydayness, after all, has at least something to do with simple observation, with submitting to the force of the ordinary, with something prolonged. It’s easy enough to get up out of the grass of life and observation in order to make grand suggestions about what the world is and what we think a life is all about.

What is this everydayness doing for Oliver?

Let’s try this:

-     Oliver is saying every day and every morning and every spring in order bind the rhythms of her mind to nature’s own revolutions, to settle her imagination into the real.

-     To do something every day is to join nature in her own proud, quiet march—the heartbeat of creation.

-     A poet is only worth the weight of her words if she has seen something true enough to bear the weight of such language. For that, she must watch. Every day.

But sit with Oliver’s poetry long enough, let it settle itself into your mind’s own revolutions, and you’ll make an observation like this:

-     The everydayness of Oliver’s poetry is also a transcendence.

I wrote that in my journal almost a year ago today. Typically, I move quickly to probing explanation. This time I let the declaration sit. I don’t want the phrase to be too quickly explained. I want its truth to come to light in another way. Not the coming to light of deduction, but the coming to light of prayer.

“I don’t know what a prayer is” Oliver says, “I do know how to pay attention.”

So, she knows what a prayer is.

Perhaps more to the point: she knows how a prayer is. She says it herself in another poem, “5 A.M. in the Pinewoods”:

“I was thinking:

So this is how you swim inward [stillness],

So this is how you flow outward [attention],

So this is how you pray.”

Prayer features often in Oliver’s poetry. It is, for her, one of those modes of human existence that submits to the world’s everydayness, a practice that makes its deposit in the world’s collective consistency, its lively persistence. Prayer is a practice whose strength is found in something too quiet to be recognized in much of what, for us, passes for power. Prayer works on the human soul gently and quietly, softly shaping it by ordinary means: attention and stillness and light, the way a plant is made quick by the sun.

The sun’s touch, a metaphor: the maker’s spark: the inner fire: the blaze of being. It makes the serpent go and the human work and the tree scream its long cry upward.

The long cry, a metaphor: earth’s praise, wordless, constant: soul’s groan: mind on tip toe: disparate things coming home: becoming a part of what we know: becoming a part of what we don’t.

I am slowly gathering all the poems with ‘everyday’ and similar phrases in Oliver’s catalogue. I have one collection which spans her career but is not exhaustive. I am not googling anything or asking AI. I am just working little by little, every day, paying attention to what is there before me, trying to learn to pay attention, trying to remember what this is for. What reading is for. What mornings are for. What this breath and this heartbeat and this mind are all for.

If I managed a systematic stranglehold on every poem with such words in one fell swoop, I would have failed. If I exercised the exertion of my powers over her work for my own gain, I would have failed.

Poetry is about every day.

Poetry, mornings, reading. It’s about: sun’s touch, and the long cry.

The reception of something real enough to give vitality to my own life and imagination; something to ground me, to grant me deeper, gentler possession of the creature I am and the story I am accountable for.

Creature and story. Everydayness and transcendence.