Work Text:
Wild Geese
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.
...
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.
(Mary Oliver)
He isn’t a biological being. Not in any compulsory way. And yet Ms. Oliver’s poem sticks with him, pops up in his head now in the low light while he and Crowley grouse amicably about human nature.
What a gentle, lovely thought. The, ah, soft animal of his body isn’t quite for him what it is for humans, but it’s a nice idea. He relates to it.
Maybe he can’t be taxonomically classified as an “animal” (or at all), but there’s a softness at the core of him all the same. It’s something that has frightened him into hiding many times before, and yet he never could bring himself to abandon it. It reaches out now, settling him on the couch beside Crowley.
He will never stop wanting to be good. How delightful it is, though, to not have to be good, to choose it — his idea of it, his hope for it — alongside all the other things he’s chosen. However the softness in him could be classified, it loves, it loves this imperfect world, it loves Crowley, and at last, it has a place.
His place in the family of things is theirs, here, intertwined with old books on knowledge and sin and infinite questioning, intertwined with the Earthly materials that comprise his old bookshop, intertwined with Crowley.
Funny, how it’s all worked out. He’d have never admitted his loneliness, that of which Ms. Oliver wrote, when Good was all he could be. And now that it’s not, he has a better place, here in the world. Crowley is the soul of it. Crowley is the one who answered the call and appeared at his door and offered the world to Aziraphale’s imagination.
Aziraphale does not have to obey someone else’s notion of “good.” Aziraphale loves what and whom he loves. Aziraphale, no longer the lonely “whoever,” is at last able to call to Crowley, murmuring in his ear, finally able to offer him a place, too.