Dogfish (Excerpt)

You don’t want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story-- a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind. And nobody, of course, is kind, or mean, for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world.

—Mary Oliver