You do not have to be good.

Mary visits and we speculate that Mary Oliver is, perhaps, like your mother. Full of sage truisms that you embrace in your early years, reject as you learn more about the world and then return to, at last, weary (poetry says "weary" but no one else does), accepting.

She was the first contemporary poet I read, 10th grade maybe? Wild Geese was the first poem another person had written that got me truly excited about poetry as a still-relevant form of writing. She plugs in well to a teenager's unremarkable catastrophes, with her, "You do not have to be good," and "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Now, I've been rebelling against such elegant simplicities for years, but thinking more and more about them anyway. My internal monologue is along the lines of: "Fine. I won't walk on my knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. Fine. Whatever."

Then we intersect with Carrie and fume about the reduction of Kurt Vonnegut to a "so it goes" tattoo on your wrist.

And so.