Upstream: Selected Essays

One Christmas morning, Oliver walks along the beach and discovers an injured male gull. She brings him home and places him in her bathtub. His eyes are half-shut, and he is deep in shock. Oliver guesses that the bird had been injured and then picked up by a coyote or fox and mauled. However, the next morning, the bird is alert and standing up. Oliver gives him a drink of water. The following day, the bird accepts food. Oliver and Molly soon realize that the gull does not want to be left alone.

They set up a little spot for the bird with towels in front of a glass door where he can watch outside. He loves the light. Each morning, he waits impatiently for Oliver to open the blinds, squawking and admonishing her. Although the gull often fixes his attention on Oliver and Molly, when the sun pours in, especially in the evening, the bird turns his focus entirely upon the light outside.

Over time, Oliver and the bird begin to develop games—tossing feathers, chewing up drawn animals on paper, and pecking at a stuffed toy lion. The gull takes baths and plays in the water. However, Oliver feels the sense that, even as she is playing with this very much alive creature, the gull is dying. He grows weaker over time. His wing and two feet begin to wither. Oliver and Molly try to ease his suffering by killing him with sleeping pills, but he awakes a few days later, alert and happy. They decide to let nature run its course.

In February, the gull’s feet fall off, and Oliver clips his wing which is being held on by a single tendon. Friends visit him, and he shows off for them, loving their applause. In mid-February, the gull dies.

Near her home around the dunes and pine woodlands, Oliver sees many owls. She watches them fly over ponds and barnyards and sit on spires. Whenever she walks in the woods, she tries to find the nest of a Great Horned Owl, but is unsuccessful. She looks across the Province Lands and around all the ponds. Although she sees many other interesting things in nature, she never finds the nest of the owl. Then spring comes, and she still has no luck.

Oliver can picture many owls, but not the Great Horned Owl which, for her, holds special significance: “But the great horned I can’t imagine in any such proximity—if one of those should touch me, it would touch to the center of my life, and I must fall” (136). Although she does not see them, their presence is made known to her by the littered, headless bodies of blue jays and rabbits.

Later, Oliver sees a Great Horned Owl. It is trying to sleep, but a murder of crows surrounds it, cawing at it and pecking at its feet. Although the crows could be hurt by the owl, they take delight in annoying the predator. Soon, the owl lifts itself by its wings and leaves. Oliver continues to walk, looking for the nest of the owl and looking at everything else too.

This essay is comprised of two mini-essays. The first is titled “Who Cometh Here?” and is written about a black bear that made its way to Provincetown where Oliver lives. The black bear traveled across Massachusetts to destroy a beehive and to find a partner. He was captured and taken back to his native territory. Oliver shakes her head at the cruelty of the story and closes the first mini-essay with a letter directly to the bear, telling him that the world is full of this sadness.

The second mini-essay, titled “Ropes,” tells the story of a puppy that appeared one day in Oliver’s yard, a chewed-up rope still attached to its collar. The puppy played with Oliver’s dogs for several hours before leaving, presumably to make his way home. The following day, the puppy appeared again, this time with a new rope that he had chewed through. Each day, the dog returned, each time with a new rope attached to his neck. Finally, the dog’s owner showed up at Oliver’s door with the dog’s paperwork. She told Oliver that the dog’s name was Sammy and that he now belonged to the poet.

As Sammy grew older, he did not lose his penchant for adventure. He was caught by the dog officer, and Oliver was told to build a fence. However, Sammy was as skilled at climbing fences as he was at chewing through ropes. Oliver’s neighbors helped watch out for Sammy, keeping him away from the eye of the dog officer. In time, the officer retired and another took his place—this one with a softer approach. Whenever the new officer saw Sammy, he loaded the dog into his truck and drove him back to Oliver’s house.

Oliver wonders if there is a poem or two in this story, particularly about the importance of breaking through the chains that restrict.

This essay focuses on a single winter which Oliver describes as being extremely dark: “Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing” (147). In the early morning, the house is cold and Oliver rises with the dogs to go for a walk. There are no stars or moon in the sky, and a small black cat darts out of the bushes. Each day begins this way.

Oliver reflects on her identity as a homebody. She does not like to travel, although she has visited Japan, Malaysia, and New Zealand. Even in her hometown, she finds travel difficult. She does not know how to get to the grocery store. Instead, she turns her attention to what is around her. The sea provides her with food. Walking home one day, she stumbles across three cod on the beach. She takes the fish home, cleans them, and eats them. The natural world around Oliver’s home is a source of comfort and delight.

She gets the sense that the trees around her home know her and are offering her a greeting. Animals say hello too, like the two deer who approach her with curiosity and the coyotes who follow her through the woods. It is the spiritual mystery of her experience in the woods that Oliver feels is real knowledge—not the rote memorization that was emphasized in her schooling. She believes that turning her attention toward the spiritual is the greatest preoccupation. The natural world is the temple where this learning takes place.

Oliver opens this essay by telling about a young man she hired to do work around her house. The man is highly skilled with tools and his hands, but during his free time he wants only to write poetry. Oliver recognizes that his poetry is not very skilled, and she wonders why someone who can do such creative work with their hands turns to poetry instead. She compares her own work to building, selecting a form and watching a poem take shape.

Oliver recalls attempting to build a house. After spending months doing deep intellectual work, she felt the need to do something with her hands. In her backyard, she built a one-room house with a door and four windows, using only found materials. Her tools had belonged to her grandfather and were not easy for her to use.

She strung an electric line so that she could place a lamp on a table in the house and write poetry. Although she did not use it very often, she felt a sense of kinship with it, as this was the house that she had built. She would build no other: “Whatever a house is to the heart and body of man—refuge, comfort, luxury—surely it is as much or more to the spirit” (160). The house, like all things, succumbed to age.

Oliver explains that people are never ready to approach the topic of personal aging and have little empathy for it. Still, the house, like all the others around it, began to decay, yet continued to stand. At the end of the essay, the carpenter Oliver has hired goes about his work, but Oliver walks into the woods and discovers a fallen maple tree. The poet wonders about the tree as a symbol and what it might mean. She decides that it symbolizes rest. Both she and her tree have built their houses. Now they may sleep.