Mary Oliver's "Some Questions You Might Ask"

Thoughts on a life full of questions.

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?


from House of Light (Beacon Press, 1990)

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My counting might be off (it most certainly is), but of the forty-seven poems in Mary Oliver’s House of Light, eighteen feature at least one question. Many of those eighteen feature more than one. One poem’s title is, in fact, a question. Today’s poem’s title — “Some Questions You Might Ask” — is a little layup to a question, or two, or more.

My copy of House of Light is stacked atop Mary Oliver’s Dream Work, in which there are forty-four poems. Eleven contain questions. A little less, by percentage, than House of Light, but still — if a poem is a life, imagine a quarter of a life spent questioning. We already spend over a quarter of it sleeping. So much of the remaining waking time, then: filled with questions.

It is New Year’s Eve — though I am writing this a day or two before — and I am not surprised that I am reading Mary Oliver (whose work I wrote about nearly two years ago) and thinking about questions. This kind of day invites reflection, I know. And though it also often invites renewal or re-commitment or, better yet, entirely new commitments, I find that it invites, at least for me, a kind of returning. Around this time of year, I return, often, to what has grounded me or excited me or moved me. For example: the first book I read at the start of each year has been, for the past few years, any book written by Larry McMurtry, because, reading the long romance of Lonesome Dove years ago, I felt like a kid again, a feeling I want to return to, or revisit, as often as I can. And so I revisit it at the start of each year. This year I am reading Streets of Laredo. I kid you not — I am giddy with the anticipation.

And so yes, a revisitation with Mary Oliver as I write this. Welcome return. When I was married almost a year ago, my mother — New England native, someone who dreams almost entirely in the sea-swept and windy language of Cape Cod — read Oliver’s “Coming Home,” which holds these lines in its heart:

...believing in a thousand
fragile and unprovable things,
looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping
barriers to the sea...

Indeed, reading these lines is a kind of coming-home, a kind of returning. I read them now and think about how often our world tells us — especially in this moment — to renew or reset ourselves, to change or to resolve to be someone a little different than who we are now. Worthy ideas, I think. But it is also worthy to remember. To remember who you are, and what you’ve come to value. To notice if you’ve drifted a little bit, the way boats do at night — nothing to be scared of; it’s just a little bit. You’re anchored, aren’t you? What anchors you? Tell me, and then, through the act of remembering, think about returning. A little bit more, each day, to yourself: believer, as you are, in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.

And so, when I think of today’s poem, I think of how there is something at work within it that I want to make an effort to return to. Notice again how it begins:

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.

All these questions, and so beautiful — the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl. One of the things I’ve learned in my years of teaching is how hard it is to ask a question, any question, that elicits the kinds of responses you are hoping for. Too structured a question and you might limit the scope of the possible answers. Too manufactured a question and you might not even get close to inspiring the slightest curiosity at all. Kids, after all, see with a different kind of clarity than we sometimes give them credit for. What I love about Mary Oliver’s questions is the way that they break the rules of generative questioning (“don’t ask a yes or no question”) and yet still remain generative by dipping their feet into wonder. They are questions as metaphors — questions that reinvigorate what possibilities we may consider when we think of how we relate to the world.

Look, too, at how these questions begin. Throughout today’s poem, Oliver repeats herself time and time again, building the cadence of a child whose hands are gripped to the back of the driver’s seat of a car, head sandwiched between their parents, asking away about everything they pass and everything that is still on the road: destination, curiosity, hunger, field full of cows.

Mary Oliver writes with that same determined, relentless wonder:

Is the soul…Is it…Who…Who…Does it…Does it…Why should I…Why should I…What about…What about…What about…What about…

In these repetitions are a kind of rapidity, the urgency that comes with awestruck curiosity, a desire to know things as you are flooded with all you do not know, which is a real hunger, a thirst for belonging, for connection. I think we feel that first hunger in childhood, and then who knows what becomes of it. Mary Oliver returns to it in this poem. I think lovingly of those final four questions. What about…what about…what about…what about. They could keep going, couldn’t they? And, in some ways, they do. They are singing through each day, bountiful as each day is. What about. What about. What about. What about. I am pointing, and you are too. We are trying to keep up with the wonder of the world. Impossible task, but a worthy one nonetheless.

And, just as importantly, Oliver’s questions are questions steeped in noticing:

I keep looking around me.

Which then means that:

One question leads to another.

There is no end, in other words, to the questioning. It makes up a life.

The other day, I was up late, sitting around a table with my wife and one of my brothers-in-law and, as I call them, my two sister out-laws. Older than when any of us first met, though still young, and drinking wine while the parents were asleep upstairs, we talked about the future in the way that people often do in moments like that — cherished little moments stolen, almost, from time, the night darkening outside so that each window reflects the scene of ourselves back towards us. There was a faint sorrow to the conversation, the sorrow — I think, as I think about it now — of wondering why you are just a little unhappy despite the obvious happiness that surrounds you, the happiness that you are part of, connected to by commitment and the new bonds of family. The sorrow, too, of trying to live with intention and finding it difficult. Yes, we were lamenting, I think, that life doesn’t necessarily get easier the more deeply you try to live it. That it gets a little more complicated, and, brings, with its complication, more pain, sometimes. The pain of witness. The pain of recognition. The pain of not being able to unsee the strange absurdity of this world, how evil it can be, and how hard. We talked about all of this for hours.

And I think that, too, is why I am here, reading Mary Oliver. To return again to that complexity — though she is often written off, so shallowly, as something other than a complex poet. I am returning to her ability to witness the world, and sit with it. To ask questions of it that don’t necessarily make life easier. They don’t need to. They just need to be asked. Sometimes not even answered. Sometimes they are, as so many questions are, unanswerable.

For the past few hours, as I’ve been reading, I’ve jotted down a list of questions from Oliver’s poems. Here they are, in litany:

From “What Is It?”:

and how could anyone believe
that anything in this world
is only what it appears to be—
that anything is every final—
that anything, in spite of its absence,
ever dies
a perfect death?

From “The Notebook”:

More and more the moments come to me:
how much can the right word do?

From “Snake”:

Well, who doesn't want the sun after the long winter?

And maybe you know these ones, from “The Summer 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 own wild and precious life?

Here is one, from the perfectly-titled “The Turtles Come to Spend the Winter in the Aquarium, Then Are Flown South and Released Back Into the Sea”:

Have you ever found something beautiful, and maybe just in time?

Or here, from “Sunrise”:

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us?

Or here, too, from “Whispers”:

have you ever
turned on your shoulder

helplessly, facing
the white moon, crying
let me in?

Or this one, from “Dogfish”:

And you know
what a smile means,
don't you?

Or this, from “Roses, Late Summer”:

Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?

And finally, from “Turtle”:

But, listen,
what's important?

(Here’s her answer, if you’re curious: Nothing’s important // except that the great and cruel mystery of the world, / of which this is a part, / not be denied.)

Peppered throughout these questions are bits of wonder, wide-eyed curiosity, playfulness, helplessness, inclusion, and connection — a longing to ask the question itself, which also means to turn to you, the reader, and say it out loud: what is it, do you think, have you ever?

Such questions make me want to refuse the certainty that is so often offered to us. The narrative of war played for us like a football game. The machinations of empire. The uncontested benefits of technological progress. Easy politics. Two sides to every story. Impossibility, unless it is sold to us as unlimited possibility. Easy greed, spat out, as it is, through advertisements that repackage greed as goodness. So much of life today involves trying to digest one certainty after another, one mission statement, one slogan, one truism offered to us in order to better our lives, or quell our rage, or limit the possibility of our curiosity, our imagination, that voice in the back of our head that says what if it didn’t have to be like this? And what if it doesn’t?

And so today, I am thinking of questions. I am thinking of what it might mean to return to that part of me — imaginative and curious and wide-eyed and maybe a little annoying to my dad on the long drive to his mother’s — that I left mostly in childhood. I am thinking of how to center that part of me, to say what about or what if or have you ever a million times over, the way Mary Oliver does in today’s poem — full of verve and the kind of feeling that, simply, loves the fragile, wild, and beautiful world. I know; I know. It’s hard. Certainty provides a kind of security, and bearing honest witness to the world involves holding a lot of sorrow in your heart. It involves asking questions that hurt a lot to ask, hearing answers that hurt a lot to hear. But I don’t know if any small change or resolution will make a life deeply felt and deeply lived any easier to bear. I think that hope comes in what we choose to bear together. Tell me, have you ever felt alone for all your wonder? Or a little sad for all your feeling? Or a little stuck for all your thinking? And if I said I have, too? What then? What now?

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Some notes:

1. A little note if you are a yearly paying subscriber to this newsletter: many of you subscribed around this time (in January 2023), and I imagine your renewal is coming up. So, if you intended to purchase that yearly subscription as a kind of token of your appreciation (thank you!!!), make sure to unsubscribe if you meant it as a one-time thing. No offense or strange ill-will will be taken or had on my part at all — just gratitude for your appreciation in the first place.

2. You should read Mosab Abu Toha’s recent essay in The New Yorker if you have not already.

3. As I mentioned in past newsletters, the ad hoc coalition Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.