Conversations with Mary Oliver: Dogfish

I adore Mary Oliver's poetry. There are a few writers who have left this world that I consider to be sort of personal patron saints, and she's one of them. Last summer, I revisited Dream Work, the collection of poems she published in 1986. The very first poem in that collection is called Dogfish, and I found myself reading and re-reading it, utterly captivated. I wrote this piece back in June, as a sort of conversation with the poem: Mary's words are in italics, and the rest are mine. I just rediscovered it and decided it belongs here; I may write up more of these sorts of conversations in the future. The full text of Dogfish can be found here.

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

Back when I was a fantasy-obsessed teenager on deviantART, I came across an artist who had written on their profile that, "A smile is just another baring of teeth." I remember little else about this person or their art, but that line has stuck in my head for decades now.

My particular brand of neurodivergence comes with a rather substantial dose of alexithymia, which is a general inability to describe one's own emotions. Decades of therapy and hard work have helped me learn how to identify when I am experiencing an emotion, but I still struggle to identify what that emotion is in the moment. If I take the time to look back and reflect later, I can probably figure out from the context clues what I was feeling, but identifying my emotions on the fly is an ongoing challenge.

Add to this the fact that I have lived my whole life in the Midwestern United States of America, where we have a reputation for an indirect and, at times, downright passive-aggressive style of communication. A smile might be a genuine expression of happiness. It could also very well be a baring of teeth.

...I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

I spent most of my teenage years battling a deep depression—a depression made all the more monstrous by the fact that I was convinced it was a burden I needed to carry alone. I didn't tell my parents. I told few of my friends. The evangelical faith I was raised in was the rock I clung to in the midst of a storm of overabundant hormones and overworked neurotransmitters.

And then, one day, after learning that a dear friend had been subjected to horrible abuse as a child, that rock began to shake. How could I believe in a God who would let such horrible things happen? The possibility of a Universe without a larger point loomed before me like an endless abyss, threatening to swallow me up in hopelessness. I tried to make sense of it. I thought I could reason my way back to faith, to a world that made sense.

You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's just the same old story —
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

My plan didn't work, in the end. The rock of my faith crumbled under the weight of my questions, and eventually I found myself floating in the Unknown. I didn't believe in God anymore. I still don't. But I also don't believe in a pointless Universe. If I have anything resembling an enduring soul, then so does every other thing on the planet. And caring for those souls...that's the point.

I want to leave my corner of the Universe a gentler place than it was when I found it.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

I smile more, these days, despite the horrors of the world at large. I laugh freely in a way I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to back when I was a teenager. The depression is still around, but I've learned how to live with it. I take antidepressants to help.

Maybe a smile, sometimes, is a genuine expression of quiet joy. Maybe it's not just a baring of teeth.

And maybe it doesn't matter. But I think that sometimes a smile is a revolutionary act, a reclaiming of power from a world that tries to convince us of our powerlessness. When marginalized people find joy, it opens a window for us to imagine better worlds into being.

And probably,
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.