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Canada geese, after leaving Mallard Lake,
are walking uphill, their webbed feet
like flippers flapping beneath the wetsuit
of their bodies. They move like heavyset
ladies who have lifted their curvaceous
selves from a swimming pool, fulsome
and luscious in their beauty. They walk
in single file as if queuing up for some-
thing so wonderful, it is worth the wait.
But it’s the same old grass, the same old
hill, though leaning over it are trees and
from the trees fall leaves through which

for Kate

Before I saw them,
Nights were silent.
Ceiling and roof closed in on me.

But after I’d seen one,
Really seven,
Then I heard them all the time.

Their noisomeness might have frightened me,
Yet it didn’t.
Night’s quiet had been the solitude of the grave.

But now death can hold no terrors
When over my head so sociably sounds
The whispering rustle of wings.

is a monument
to astonishment—to loss—to wives
I might have lived—children I might have
mothered—smothered in sulfurious flame—lost
to a god I was told to obey
a monument to what is
essential—unbearable—what tears
what preserves—perseveres
in the face of loss—the sea of it
what is extracted from the eye
the I—the heart—the heart of it
hard-hearted god—the hurt of it
extracted from the face—the facing of it
streams of loss—unbearable salt

Consider the paper on which
I write, and, however hidden,
all it contains: in the forest,
the tree, the person who felled it,
those at the pulp mill, the mothers,
the fathers, the farmers who fed
them, the crops in the fields, onion,
rhubarb, spinach, corn, the rain that
watered, the sunlight that warmed,
the soil, the earthworm, the honeybee,
root.

Consider the words, these printed
in ink, the eyes that see, the mind
that reads, the hand that is holding
pine, paper, peach.

Some insights come like lightning—
blinding and fierce—while others arrive
as firefly-flashes that brighten only
an inch or so of air around them.
Yet even these can gather power
over time, like the summer night
I woke and stood at the window
to watch all that pulsing outside—
like thousands of prayers flaring up
above the houses, saying here
and here and here, as I made my way
down the stairs using only the light
of those small bodies to guide me.