The White Geese

Waiting has been, always, a discipline 
alien to me. Too often, impatience consumes me. 
I am a candle, its dark wick burning down too fast, 
a lonely thumb of wax destined for snuffing. 
I will watch, then, as its pale smoke drifts 
to the ceiling like an angel’s scarf, before thinning, 
vanishing. Today my living spread ahead of me 
like a field dank with wet in fall, decorated with 
flocks of white geese. With what integral grace 
their congregation lifts and lowers over the field, 
like a woman in her backyard, whose white sheets 
on the line lift their wings to receive the wide air.