Tuesday Teasers on Friday--Yes, Late Again

In keeping with my recent rebellion against all rules and constraints, I bring you not just Tuesday Teasers on a Friday--but I bring you poetry--in the form of a whole damn poem.

Teaser Tuesdays, hosted at Should Be Reading, asks you to:

Grab your current read.

Let the book fall open to a random page.

Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.

You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

I'm currently in between books, more or less (I have more partially read books laying around my house than surfaces to put them on. I'd like to think it's just that I've become more discriminating and don't want to waste my precious time reading stuff I don't enjoy, but really--I think I've just completely lost all focus--for reading and just about everything else.)

Last week, I accidentally came across a couple of poems by Mary Oliver (of whom I had not heard, despite the fact that she has won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award), and I was very moved. I am not a big poetry reader--I'm just too linear, I suspect, and that makes me impatient with what I perceive as the inaccessibility of some poetry--The Wasteland, excepted, of course. However, I so loved and related to the poems I read, I immediately ordered not one, not two, but three volumes of Mary Oliver's poetry. I can't ever remember buying even a single volume of poetry, outside of class requirements. (Oh, once I bought some Rilke, because I was trying to track down, unsuccessfully I might add, a poem I had heard quoted....). This week's poem is from Mary Oliver's, Dreamwork.

Anyway, here's your dose of poetry. Now sit back and take your medicine like a good girl/boy. It's really NOT that bad:

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.

p. 14