"Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine"

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

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's poem is beautiful, and compassionate, and loving, although it stung much of "home again" and "family", and these are concepts I'm constantly struggling with, which may explain why my first reaction was quietly and sadly refutative, and reminded me one of the homeless kids I work with in Salt Lake who shakes his head when someone (stupidly) blanket statement tells him "It's gonna be ok." But the weird thing is: I DO believe "it's gonna be ok"--I wish I had written what Mary Oliver had. Instead, just an ekprhasis exercise:

It's funny
I have those things: the sun more than
half the year in these mountains
pebbled, undarked by elk hoof prints,
bearded with fir and ever whispering
aspens that stand slender tall
as I want to.
I have those things: rivers chuckling
between the beavers’ dams, those stream-
branches that giggling (and whatever else
the poets say that rivers do),
cut into my switchback trails.
I have that soft animal body too.
Never firm enough
despite my fish-and-rice-and-running-regi-
men. And I have that flat deserted despair,
crawling, as my too loose ligaments only able,
toward some deictic orientation
that wavering mirage.