Robin's Poem

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?