Geese
When you grow up with neither the joy
nor the burden of being some specific man’s
child but instead your father
—faceless, nameless—but still in need
of being called something, thus father,
is an occasional
thought
and the memory of other occasional thoughts, not a man, not even a feeling
really,
unless
not knowing
what to feel
can be counted as a feeling, just the
sudden event of him, not him the person, but
rather his absence and whatever it is
that brings it to your mind, say, a movie or a conversation with a friend whose
father just died
or all the old anger at your mother for never talking about the man, the huge
chasm
her
silence nurtured…so much you’ll never know
about her because
she never gave you permission to ask about him. This occurs
to
you as you sit looking
out your living room window at a flock of geese, thinking about your father,
although—see
above—not really.
The geese arrived this morning. Is it
still true what you learned as a kid? Is it somehow
programmed into their brains,
this particular place to eat, shit and
make enough noise to wake you? Or was this simply
a convenient spot
to land, touchdown, figure out what next? And
when one of your neighbors buzzes someone
into the building and
the geese
all look up at once, why is that so
unnerving? Dozens of little heads turning towards
you
suddenly, the dark lines
of their long necks slicing through the
air above their fat, awkward bodies. It’s one
of those rare moments
that reminds
you of how
strange the world is, that makes you wonder what geese are…or trees,
the crab apples
staining the pavement,
the river in the distance running while the ground stands still. So much you take
for granted, this planet, its oddness,
its craziness, its constant revolution around a ball of fire for
goodness sake, one
of how many planets
in how many galaxies…infinite space brimming with hundreds of millions
of
voices whispering,
Father, where are you? Mama, why won’t you talk to me? And then a
question
that
ushers you back
to the present, Where do geese go when they die? Because there are
dozens
of
geese out there everyday,
year after year, yet you’ve never seen
a dead goose. Do other animals eat them, carry
them off to some secret place?
And why now are they suddenly turning in mass and running towards the river’s
edge
where
they all stop
and flap their wings and make an
explosion of geese sounds? Should
you run, too?
Where?
