I see them nearly every day
of the cold months, gathered
on the golf course greens, congregating
the way geese do.
They get a bad rap here, the way
they clog the parking lots of our office parks,
poop on our cars and squawk like we’re imposters
as we try to squeak by.
But these winter mornings I linger
at the bathroom window and quietly thrill
at the thought of them saying, in their honking goose talk,
You think this is yours?
A story old as air says it was the geese
who, on their downy backs, ushered
home the earth’s first woman.
Our first friends in an unfamiliar realm.
My father has gone and I can’t imagine
where. Consider a commemorative
tattoo, even though he never liked them.
A broad billowy wing? A backyard bird?
Nothing is good enough. This I know
surely as the geese will leave
in the spring, forever back and forth
covering the distance between.
—
Abby Wheeler lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a Pushcart nominee and has work published or forthcoming in The Cimarron Review; Grist; the anthology, I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices (Sheila-Na-Gig) and elsewhere.
