adayinthelesbianlife:For more than forty years, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver lived on Cap
adayinthelesbianlife:For more than forty years, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver lived on Cape Cod with the love of her life, the remarkable photographer Molly Malone Cook.When Cook died in 2005 at the age of eighty, Oliver looked for a light, however faint, to shine through the thickness of bereavement. She spent a year making her way through thousands of her spouse’s photographs and unprinted negatives, which Oliver then enveloped in her own reflections to bring to life Our World - part memoir, part deeply moving eulogy to a departed soulmate, part celebration of their love for one another through their individual creative loves. Embraced in Oliver’s poetry and prose, Cook’s photographs reveal the intimate thread that brought these two extraordinary women together — a shared sense of deep aliveness and attention to the world, a devotion to making life’s invisibles visible, and above all a profound kindness to everything that exists, within and without.Oliver ends Our World with The Whistler, a poem on never fully knowing even those nearest to us — a beautiful testament to what another wise woman once wrote: “You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”THE WHISTLERAll of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a suddenI mean that for more than thirty years she had notwhistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who wasin the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, andshe was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild andcheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, shesaid. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I canstill whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolledthrough the house, whistling.I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.And the devotions. And for all that, do we even beginto know each other? Who is this I’ve been living withfor thirty years?This clear, dark, lovely whistler? -- source link