What's in a Name?

why (extra) soft animal?

Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese begins like this:

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.

I was maybe thirty years old the first time I read this. I related real hard to the knee-walking, having been raised by a very …