the summer day
dear Mary Oliver, here's what I plan to do
The story behind Oliver’s most beloved poem (I haven’t checked the stats, but surely) The Summer Day is that the grasshopper was in fact, a grasshopper. And that it (they/them, again, no clue about this aspect) helped itself to a snack of frosting from a slice of a Portugese lady’s 90th birthday cake, which, according to Oliver, wasn’t important to the poem, only that she watched “that little creature come to my plate and say, I’d like a little helping of that.”
And from there, this poem.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Well. I’m no Mary Oliver (yes I really did just write that), but I am kin to the small things that stick in my mind gnawing holes through supposed big memories. Big memories of the kind that have an entire scrapbook to themself, or are framed and on the mantel.
But really, is it ever the cake? The gifts, the Hallmarked thoughts, the shoes, the dress, the on-one-knee story, or any such planned hoopla? No.
I read this about the poem, which for me, also succinctly sums up how I want to chocolate, which is both my day job and something I wasn’t expecting to find.
At its heart, this poem is a little revolution, a provocative question mark beside the conventional answers to the query, What makes for a day well lived? How should I spend this “summer day”?
This summer day, I mean — the one we’re in right now. The one we’ll live in tomorrow.
via, The Salt
If I wanted to make an ode to Mary Oliver chocolate it would need something small that I could stir into the batch, which I’d hope would point in a random direction, then would come back around once all the unwrapping and a nibble or a chomp, was over and done. I’d want it to tickle the back of necks, not in a creepy OMG there’s an Insect in My Hair! way, but just a soft whirr of feeling. If you’ve listened to crickets: that. I want to create something that makes us walk outside on a summer night and listen.
Yes: I do get the grasshopper v. cricket, and no, this is not exact science.
Chocolate in my hands at least, isn’t an exact formulation: I’m not making chocolate with mass replication or sameness in mind. Note the anything but perfect shapes above, not how I intended them but the way they turned out.
What I want is a bit of frosting and an old lady’s party and a favorite poet’s grasshopper-inspired writing inside it.
I want bits of real, and as many smidges of Do you see what I just saw? that I can stir in, and at least a few teensy hints of What was that soft, so soft whirring, almost a tiny chirrup-chirrup, like a purr, like a wind brushing the back curl I need to have trimmed, like yesterday; a small and steady throb throb heartbeat note of something (is it cardamom? some matcha sprig? some flicker of doug fir tip dipped in salt air?) so tiny, you can only taste it when you close your eyes, and let the idea of it prickle step across your neck.
Anyway, that’s what I plan to do.
If you’ve read along this far you might be wondering about the publication name change (yes) and why, which I wrote about here. Yes, there will still be lit and chocolate but there’s a bit more than I could fit. If you’re looking for my other publication, the Next Batch, it’s still here. Maybe we’ll say the grasshopper’s out of the box and go from there.