Geese

The wild Canadian geese are back but saying wild seems wrong. They act very domestic for they are certainly at home on the lawn beyond my patio. Sometimes Joe, the handyman or general factotum here, decides to chase them away. He runs at them and they gabble at him and scuttle about without panic. It looks like a game. Sometimes Joe carries a quart bottle of water [maybe it's mixed with ammonia] to make them take him more seriously. They don't. They leave their dropping generously all over the grass which is not pretty but it dries rapidly and looks like so many long ashes from cigarettes. The green grass has shot up taller than the brown matt of old winter grass, here and there short dandelions button the whole lawn together, the myrtle along the edge of the building has purple flowers and the forsythia by my bedroom window is a fountain of golden blooms. Spring will come and go all this month changing often from golden to gray to golden again.

For a bit of poetry today, here are the first
and last lines of Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese" -- there's much more. I recommend hat ireading the whole thing.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the dessert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
. . .
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.