The Innisfree Poetry Journal
www.innisfreepoetry.org
by Yvette Neisser
AT PRIME HOOK WILDLIFE REFUGE, DELAWARE
At first it sounds like an underwater flapping, or a paddle's slap on the surface, as if something were announcing its presence— and the same sudden noise comes from the other end of the marsh, a call and response.
Alone at dawn, I sense that something is teasing me. In this unfamiliar wilderness of holly and white pine, I wait for the mystery to reveal itself. Wind skims the water. Marsh grass rustles the surface. A heron glides in the distance, disappears. A long silence, and my head snaps in the direction of the far pond, where the flapping has now become visible—
Snow geese. They have ceased their honking to take turns churning still water into a spray.
This is not for me. I am the invisible one, a foreigner, irrelevant in this avian world.
GRIEF
When the grief began to lift I didn't want it to go, didn't want to separate mother into present tense and father into past—
I wanted your death to remain shocking, your blood always on the t-shirt, your voice always on the machine—wanted to hold on to our last conversation, sun pouring through the windows of my new apartment as I carried the phone through each doorway, describing to you the size of each room, the hardwood floors, the angles of light, the graceful twist of a live oak in the yard—
didn't want to believe my discovery one day at the beach on seeing a father and daughter walking together, their shadows in the sand: my father has no legs for walking, has no body; if his shadow were here, it would not resemble this father's shadow.
MIGRATION
All day, V's of snow geese emerge from fog, slide into one another, fluid, marking the sky with black wings as if all that mattered were the migration to another climate, a different sky.
Then the sky returns to white, as sound to silence.
Until at day's end, a flaming pink the clouds clear just enough to reveal the entire sun falling to the ground.
Next morning you discover their stopping-place, a coastal marsh, and find that yesterday's black birds are really pure white with black-tipped wings. Thousands of them lift into the air at once and the very surface of the water seems to rise, so many black-edged snowflakes falling upwards.
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