Late fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
— Raymond Carver
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, Dream Work, 1986.
The first revolution is when you change your mind
“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. What you see later on is the results of that, but that revolution, that change that takes place will not be televised.”
— Gil Scott-Heron
I wondered where you were
The dog stood at the entrance to a rabbit-run, his whole body alert to possibility. He sniffed and watched the brambles. And standing there, on the trail, I watched him as the sunrise cast those pastel colours, gilding the dry winter grasses, steaming frost from the ground. The distant mountains looked like they belonged on a label pasted to a cheap wine bottle that you would scratch and peel as the evening dragged and conversation veered from small-talk to small-flirtation. And you smiled, even though your hair smelled like smoke, and you wanted to be anywhere else. You were that uptempo song with the sad lyrics that might make people cry if they could just stop dancing for a minute and really listen. And, in that moment, as I bristled against the morning chill, I wondered where you were.