The through-line
Both poets using the image of some line holding reality together, whether it’s the mere existence of honey, or the thesis of a life. This is similar to the previous pairing, I am more than me, that has one poem connected in space and one in time.
It fills you with the soft essence of vanished flowers, it becomes a trickle sharp as the hair that you follow from the honey pot over the table and out the door and over the ground, and all the while it thickens, grows deeper and wilder, edged with pine boughs and wet boulders, pawprints of bobcat and bear, until deep in the forest you shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark, you float into and swallow the dripping combs, bits of the tree, crushed bees--a taste composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found. --Mary Oliver
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding. You don’t ever let go of the thread. --William Stafford