Momentary Froth

The geese rise from the lacquered edge.

The inexpressive top has abandoned itself to momentary froth and from the car window

The white churning bleeds its whiteness into spread feathers white and gray; stillness and soaring,

their wings pluck air, they plunge, and though I cannot see it,

The water beats beneath their picturesque fervor.

It cannot be an easy thing to rise up without a compass and live

Always on the edge of worlds

Between the blue and black, flickering feathers staving off the

cold, eyes calculating the light, wings holding down the ground.

Their biographies a slim

testimony

to a life perpetually in flight. But I give them some of my own

otium¹;

Terroris sentio sensum, sensu terroris² I quaver at such an extreme existence.

I dip my wings with fury. I grant the geese the calm I feel

Upon seeing them rise. Sapient suddenly, as if always a human face summoning the forces of

Identity –

Who were their mothers, what were their fathers like, did they stutter when angry? –

each defeathered, each apperceptive in delight.

But they are soaring away.

I know only the direction,

I do not know the way to hold them down, or to maintain the strength of my wings.

Perhaps it is an extreme anthropocentrism to say they do not have

A home:

The freedom of these wings is not the freedom of action,

And the loneliness of these wings is not the quest for solace.

Above the ground I am not free for distraction. The wing is my task.

But now the water no longer reflects their balanced

Dance,

And they have moved to some other tightrope point in time.

1 From Latin: Leisure time; comfort time; the time for doing one’s own private things, apart from the larger demands of the proper, officially functioning world of business and obligation.

2 I feel the sense of terror, with a sense of terror