my understanding and interpretation of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” cannot be untangled from the fact that it was originally published to follow her poem about childhood sexual abuse, “Rage”
i just don’t think it was unintentional that these were presented flush against each other
[image text:
Rage by Mary Oliver
You are the dark song of the morning; serious and slow, you shave, you dress, you descend the stairs in your public clothes and drive away, you become the wise and powerful one who makes all the days possible in the world. But you were also the red song in the night, stumbling through the house to the child’s bed, to the damp rose of her body, leaving your bitter taste. And forever those nights snarl the delicate machinery of the days. When the child’s mother smiles you see on her cheekbones a truth you will never confess; and you see how the child grows– timidly, crouching in corners. Sometimes in the wide night you hear the most mournful cry, a ravished and terrible moment. In your dreams she’s a tree that will never come to leaf– in your dreams she’s a watch you dropped on the dark stones till no one could gather the fragments– in your dreams you have sullied and murdered, and dreams do not lie.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Mary Oliver]
