The thing about a goose is that there is no such thing as a "tame" one. A goose is always wild, and stubborn, and independent. He will not listen to your threats and he is not afraid of your big stick.

When I was seven, my parents, my two sisters, and I lived on a "farm" in Tennessee. We always joked about it actually being a "farm" because while we had a fairly large garden and 5 acres of land and a pond, we didn't have any animals. My parents had always dreamed of living on a Tennessee farm with crops, and cows, and chickens, and children, and while we saved up money to build a big farm house and buy animals, we were making do with our vegetable garden and our tin roof should-have-been-condemned two-bedroom house. Then one summer my parents announced that we were going in with the neighbors to buy some geese. Geese! How exciting! I'd never owned a goose before. I think I had seen a few at the pond in Lubbock, Texas where my grandfather used to take us with some breadcrumbs. Or were those ducks? Maybe both? Geese would be fun. I couldn't wait to share my breadcrumbs with them.

I think we had the geese for about a month? All I can remember is that we spent a lot of time chasing them with sticks. They quickly grew in notoriety in our "neighborhood." The phone would ring, and my mom would yell out the screen door that Old Miss "Whatwashername" was calling again about the geese being in her garden and eating her lettuce. I didn't know geese liked lettuce. That was our signal to pick up a couple of sticks and go chase the geese off of Old Miss "Whatwashername's" property on to our own. Between the five or six of us kids (me and my two sisters plus the kids of the neighbors who were sharing the geese with us), it would take what seemed like hours to get the two geese back on the right side of the fence. We would herd one through and while we were working on the second one the first would skirt around us. We'd wave our sticks and they'd just sneer and hiss at us. None of us would actually hit them, except maybe Greg, who was the only boy among us. But even when he did, they didn't seem to fear him. Eventually, we'd herd the geese back onto our side of the land only to repeat the same silly dance several more times that day. This went on for a few weeks before our parents finally gave up and decided that geese were not the best kind of farm animal and we should probably keep saving up for a good chicken or cow.  Geese were simply untamable.

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.
Meanwhile 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.

-Wild Geese by Mary Oliver