Substrate

when the evening is spread out against the sky ​ Poetry is language at its best. ​ You have a book open on your lap but you’re not reading it.

I first read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” on Twitter, which explains something of why her work is both beloved and dismissed. It’s a boring discussion: I enjoyed this, but is it art? I won’t stoop to take the bait of it here. “Wild Geese” is one of those telegraphic poems that announces its meaning without flourish from the very outset: You do not have to be good. I feel worthy of being in the world when I think of “Wild Geese.” I feel that the world has use for me. It’s a poem of arresting lucidity and wisdom. It would be stupid to call it simple in that way that suggests that simplicity is a moral good or an aesthetically preferable state. But I also won’t say that it is complex, as though one needs to apologize for the spare nonpyrotechnics of the piece. Instead, I’ll say simply that “Wild Geese” is a poem that made me want to breathe again. The speaker, in an act of breathtaking generosity, offers the reader, no matter how lowly or afield they have found themselves, an opportunity to reenter the world. There is an entreaty to follow the natural grain of one’s character, to heed one’s desire.

But of course, the magic of the poem, and that of many of Oliver’s poems in particular, is how it creates this sense of being implausibly singled out and told what you were waiting to hear.

Mary Oliver has died. I have a friend who used to keep her poem “Wild Geese” folded up in his wallet. It begins: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a