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Lance Lee

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Geese

Daily they practice flights of Vs
these buoy shaped birds
who soon must fly south.
The sky whitens with the season,
frost burns the tundra gold and red:

one day ice shines through noon
and hearts harden to the gauntlet
they must fly - ozone-free light
that irradiates and warps the gene,
acid rain that burns the feather,

and stinging air from great cities
that makes them fly blind. Storms
roll them into airy heaps, and guns
wink from estuary and pond
where they think to rest

until the beloved’s wings go limp
and plummet to waiting teeth
happy to sink into grief. Only then
do the warm waters of their refuges
embrace and solace them

as they fall from the sky like confetti.
Are they so dumb or so forgetful
they come and come again each year
never changing their way?
Or from some well of fellow-feeling

Do they forgive without demure
the death we bring as the one
the world exacts for life?
How innocent they are of our denials,
our artilleries of self-hatred and despair

that turn outwards and become bullet and gun.
The sun shimmers from spread wings,
their cries and scribbles crowd the sky-
then they are gone, as though erased,
a last feather spiraling down

through the silencing, haunted air.

 


Lance Lee’s poems appear regularly in the UK in journals such as Ambit, Orbis, Acumen, Stand and Agenda. A novel, Second Chances, and A Poetics for Screenwriters are due out in 2001. A book of poems, Wrestling with the Angel, is available from The Smith, New York.

 

Page(s) 94-95

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