Blessings
by Jay Parini
Blessings for these things:
the dandelion greens I picked in summer
and would douse with vinegar and oil
at grandma’s little house in Pennsylvania,
near the river. Or the small potatoes
she would spade to boil and butter,
which I ate like fruit with greasy fingers.
Blessings for my friend, thirteen
that summer when we prayed by diving from a cliff
on Sunday mornings in the church
of mud and pebbles, foam and moss.
I will not forget the fizz and tingle,
sunning in wet skin on flat, cool rocks,
so drenched in summer.
And for you, my love, blessings
for the times we lay so naked in a bed
without the sense of turbulence or tides.
I could just believe the softness of our skin,
those sheets like clouds,
how when the sunlight turned to roses,
neither of us dared to move or breathe.
Blessings on these things and more:
the rivers and the houses full of light,
the bitter weeds that taste like sun,
dirt-sweetened spuds,
the hard bright pebbles, spongy mosses,
lifting of our bodies into whiffs of cloud,
all sleep-warm pillows in the break of dawn.
If you want to get in the mood, in the mood to feel fully alive and grateful that is, spend some time in Jay Parini’s “Blessings.” It’s like a hot tub of sensuality, and I don’t mean the sexy kind. The poem is so overwhelmingly physical to me I feel as if the greasy potatoes in the poem were potatoes I ate, and the cool rocks were rocks I lay upon, and the rosy sunrise was one I watched through the window.
This beautifully symmetrical poem is structured by two sonnets of two stanzas each, sitting one atop the other like four stones in a cairn. The first two stanzas are set in childhood, one with his grandmother in a rural Pennsylvania cabin and the other with his best friend during a summer in early adolescence. The third stanza finds him in a bedroom with his lover, and the fourth brings together past and present—his memories “and more”—for a final blessing.
If my use of the term “final blessing” sounds vaguely religious to you (and if you’re Catholic, the reference isn’t vague at all), it’s intentional. “Blessings” is full of religious language and images. Grandma dousing the salad with vinegar and oil is like an anointing; the two boys “pray” in a “church” of mud and pebbles; the sun turns to roses like water to wine; the “lifting of our bodies into whiffs of cloud” sure sounds like a resurrection to me. “I could just believe” he says, placing himself on the wobbly edge of belief and non-belief.
What he firmly believes in is the sacredness of ordinary experiences—eating, swimming, lying in bed. He looks back on these moments with wonder and awe, he affirms their existence outside the “sense of turbulence or tides,” he blesses them.
I’m re-reading “Blessings” for the first time since leaving the poem at a mountaintop restaurant in Switzerland last fall. It’s been almost as long since I looked at these pictures. It was a random pairing (I had only so many poems in my backpack to choose from), but now, from the distance of time, it seems anything but. The poem brings back that moment so viscerally it’s become a bigger, more enriching experience than I had realized at the time.
My husband, my friends and I were less than an hour into our Alpine hike when we came upon a restaurant with majestic views of the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau mountains. Not really needing a rest but recognizing the beauty of the setting, we stopped and ordered hot chocolates and a slice of kuchen to share. Next to us an en plein air art class was underway. The instructor was discussing how to capture the light on the white-capped peaks and the green valleys below. We breathed in the quiet mountain air. Everything was still and sun-soaked. We were so pleased, so delighted.
Much has happened since that time last September. Much has changed. I look back and see that not only was it a blessed moment but that we blessed it, just as Parini blesses his own moments by noticing and describing them. Because what is a blessing but a pause, a stop in forward motion, a time to look about and say, This is good, may this always be good.
He has taught at Middlebury College for over 40. Years. He’s published 8 novels, 6 books of poetry, biographies of Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Jesus, John Steinbeck and Gore Vidal, who was a longtime friend. He co-founded The New England Review,
Parini has three sons with his wife, clinical psychologist and writer Devon Jersild.