Wild Geese
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 your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
Meanwile 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.

There we were driving down the narrow little dirt road in the Anderson Valley, tall blackberry vines rising up on both sides of us. The road was not in the best of shape and I was concerned we were even in the right place. We had driven past it on Hwy 128 several times before we finally found the address on the mailbox. She had read about this place, Lazy Creek winery and this was supposed to be it.

Her name was Laverne. It was 1983 and we had been living together for a year now …known each other since 1969 when her twin sister, Lavone introduced us. Back then I was just 18. She was 19 and was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her sister was tall at 6 foot and she was just an inch or two shorter with long legs, long dark hair and fair light skin. She walked with her shoulders back and her chest and small breasts out and she was beautiful. I was attending Sonoma State University then and she had been going to UC Berkeley …and she was very cool. I had one very large crush on her.

We became friends and I visited her out in Pocket Canyon many times where she lived in a renovated and converted bus parked under the redwoods next to an apple orchard. We would stay up and talk all night and sometimes I would spend the night but our relationship never developed into a sexual one. I was very shy …and she was way to cool. I had her on quite a pedestal.

She moved away from Northern California a year or two later and eventually got her masters degree from Arizona State in Archeology. We stayed in touch and it always made me smile when I found one of her letters in the mail. She would send me poetry …with pictures she had found cut out of magazines to go with the words. I loved getting her letters. She worked in archeology for several years until one day in 1982 she called to tell me that she couldn’t take it anymore …the living in small town motels in the middle of  nowhere. I flew to Tuscon and we packed her things into a U-Haul truck and drove back to Santa Rosa. We moved in together and became lovers …I’m not sure which happened first.

We would frequently return to the southwest where we explored Indian ruins. She was an archeologist had access to sites that most people did not even know about. It was very fun and I came to love the dessert and the southwest.

But here we were now driving down this little dirt road …not sure we were even in the right place. We came to a farmhouse with a barn and some out-buildings …and nothing that would indicate that we had found what we were looking for …no sign that said “Lazy Creek”. I knocked on the door but no one answered and I new this could not be the place. So we headed back out the way we came in when a few hundred yards down the road an old pickup truck came from the other direction. There was no room to pass so we backed all the way back to the farmhouse where I was sure we would have to explain to the man in the truck what we were doing there.

He climbed out of his truck with a smile and introduced himself as Hans Kobler, owner and winemaker of Lazy Creek …invited us to follow him to a building around behind the house where he opened a bottle of red wine and brought out some Gruyere cheese to have with it. We talked and he told us his story …he was Swiss and how he had just won an award for his wine …and how he came to buy the property there in the valley. I will always remember that glass of wine. It was the most interesting delicious wine I had ever tasted. It was a Pinot Noir and it became my favorite. I have been in love with it ever since.

Many years have passed and Laverne and I are still good friends …she is my oldest friend actually. We have both been married and divorced and through other relationships. We still commiserate, talk about our lives and we still occasionally get out to taste some wine together from time to time.

I have my own small vineyard now and have learned to make some of my own Pinot Noir …just enough for a couple of cases so far …and have recently meet someone very special. The other night we shared the very first bottle of my wine and our first kisses together. I will always remember the wine and her first kisses and how special they were to me that day …and how it made me remember the time I fell in love with Pinot Noir.

Dark wine reminds me of you,
The burgundies and cabernets.
The tang and thrum and hiss
That spiral like Egyptian silk,
Blood bit from a lip, black
Smoke from a cigarette.

Nights that swell like cork.
This night. A thousand.
Under a single lamplight.
In public or alone.
Very late or very early.
When I write my poems.

Something of you still taut
Still tugs still pulls,
A rope that trembled
Hummed between us.
Hummed, love, didn’t it.
Love, how it hummed.

Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, v. I.

The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise —-

By Hafiz

Now that I have raised the glass of pure wine to my lips,
The nightingale starts to sing!

Go to the librarian and ask for the book of this bird’s songs, and
Then go out into the desert. Do you really need college to read this book?

Break all your ties with people who profess to teach, and learn from the
Pure Bird. From Pole the news of those sitting in quiet solitude
is spreading.

On the front page of the newspaper, the alcoholic Chancellor of the University
Said, “Wine is illegal. It’s even worse than living off charity.”

It’s not important whether we drink Gallo or Mouton Cadet, drink up!
And be happy, for whatever our Winebringer brings is the essence of grace.

The stories of the greed and fantasies of all the so-called “wise ones”
Remind me of the mat-weavers who tell tourists that each strand is a
yarn of gold.

Hafiz says: The town’s forger of false coins is also president of the city bank.
So keep quiet, and hoard life’s subtleties. A good wine is kept for drinking,
never sold.

The fragrance of balsam extracted from aromatic trees;
the ripe odor yielded by the teeming saffron;
the perfume of fruits mellowing in their winter season;
or of silken robes of the empress from her Palatine wardrobes;
of amber warmed by the hand of a maiden;
of a jar of dark Falernian wine, broken and scented from a distance;
of a garden that attracts Sicilian bees;
of the alabaster jars of Cosmus, and the altars of the gods;
of the chaplet just fallen from the brow of the luxurious;
– but why should I mention all these things singly?
not one of them is enough by itself;
mix all together, and you have the perfume of the morning kisses of my favorite.
Do you want to know her name?
I will only tell you of the kisses.
You swear to be secret.
You want to know to much, Sabinus.

By Rumi

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language-door and

open the love-window. The moon
won’t use the door, only the window.

Marian. You are a wanton.
Robin Hood. One, I do confess,
I want-ed till you came; but now I have you
I’ll grow to your embraces till two souls,
Distilled into kisses through our lips,
Do make one spirit of love.

Burgundy is a wine that can sing like a nightingale, shine forth like a sapphire, intrigue like the most complex of chess problems and seduce like the first kiss of someone you are just about to fall in love with.