First Versagraph: “Today again I am hardly myself”
The speaker in Mary Oliver’s “Reckless Poem” suggests that today she is feeling somewhat outside herself, and she reveals that this “happens over and over.” But instead of taking a negative track with this feeling, she deems, “It is heaven-sent.”
This feeling allows her to experience consciousness that transcends ordinary waking consciousness: she is not dreaming, nor is she day-dreaming, but she has tapped into a part of herself that whispers from her soul secrets deep from nature.
Second Versagraph: “It flows through me”
This remarkable, “heaven-sent” feeling allows her to intuit the space that literally exists throughout the physical body, permitting it to “flow[ ] through [her] / like the blue wave.” The imagination, of course, can account for anything or any feeling, but the imagination may also be informed by long-forgotten memories.
This speaker, though working consciously through the imagination, is touching ancient memories of having lived as lower forms of life. The line “Green leaves – you may believe this or not – / have once or twice / emerged from the tips of my fingers.” She must add the disclaimer of “believe this or not,” because she cannot quite believe it herself.
The speaker is not a mystic nor advanced yogi who can remember her past lives, but a creative thinker who can fashion intuitive bursts of reality into poems. She does not remember her past life as a tree, but some mysterious force in her consciousness allows her to intuit vague glimpses of that experience.
Third Versagraph: “somewhere”
The experience of having green leaves growing from the “tips of [her] fingers” seems like a “reckless” thing to be claiming; thus she assigns the strange knowledge to a deep dark place: “somewhere / deep in the woods, / in the reckless seizure of spring.” Such thoughts seem crazy, without merit; they seem to emerge from a chaos that may titillate but at the same frighten. Such thoughts seem “reckless.”
Fourth Versagraph: “Though, of course, I also know that other song”
To further distance her crazy talk of having leaves growing from her fingers, she adds another disclaimer in the form of a proclamation that she also knows “that other song, / the sweet passion of one-ness.” If she has the ability of knowing “one-ness,” and also how sweet that “one-ness” is, then no one can accuse her of being out of touch with reality.
The speaker not only hopes to convince her readers/listeners of her basic sanity, but she also wants to reassure herself that she is only playing with possibilities, not stating literal reality in any form. She must do this delicately, however, in order to preserve the sanctity of the poem. If it is too literal, it will fall flat, but if it is too fantastic, it will simply sound unbelievable.
Fifth Versagraph: “Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the”
The speaker recounts an outing during which she “watched an ant.” The ant was laboring, as ants are wont to do, and the speaker is impressed with ant’s virtuosity. But the speaker makes the apparently rational claim that the ant “will never live another life but this one.” But to counter this appalling notion of living only one life, the speaker offers, “if she lives her life with all her strength / is she not wonderful and wise?”
This question prompts the speaker to think of the “miraculous pyramid of everything / until I came to myself.” All those marvelous beings have only one life, but if they live them with all their strength, perhaps they are all “wonderful and wise.”
Sixth Versagraph: “And still, even in these northern woods, on these hills of sand”
In the final versagraph, the speaker opens the floodgate of reincarnational intuition. When she signals her final point with “And still,” she is saying, despite the supposed empirical knowledge that seems to claim that all beings live one life, I have experienced these flashes that tell me otherwise: “I have flown from the other window of myself / to become white heron, blue whale / red fox, hedgehog.”
She leaves the commonly held notion of “one body, one life” and soars in the rarified air of reality that she has inhabited bodies of many other life forms including “the body of a flower.” She chooses a remarkable final image: “my heart is a red parrot, perched / among strange, dark trees, flapping and screaming.”
As a rational, intellectual, she cannot literally accept such as the imagination will concoct, but her soul tells her that it has lived many lives in many different forms of life, and it is “screaming” the truth in her well-tuned ear.
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