Poem for Thursday and Neighborhood Geese

Goose
By Fleda Brown

Who knows
if the goose goes
along its trajectory
for the reasons we suppose?
Such faith we have
in the genes,
so little thought for thought,
however wrought,
in creatures unlike us.
So little confidence in art
that teases apart
the sense we’ve made of things
and leaves us with nothing
smart to say,
and no way gracefully
to get away.

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It was a pretty unexciting Wednesday around here that involved mostly chores, though I did have two points of entertainment. My mother came over to make my kids try on the suits they wore to Adam's Bar Mitzvah last year to see whether they'll fit for my niece's Bat Mitzvah next month, to which the boys reacted as though she'd come over to pull their teeth (Daniel's suit will fit, Adam's isn't even close, meaning he has to be dragged shopping tomorrow). Before that, I went to the post office to send off some packages, and on the way home I stopped at the pond in the housing development next to mine where in past years geese have raised families, and I was not disappointed:

















We're still (re)watching the Tennant-Stewart Hamlet, so I am distracted -- well, the play has finished (I thought it was excellent the first time and my opinion hasn't changed; I really like this Gertrude and this Ophelia, though the stronger Ophelia is early on in any production, the harder it is to swallow how completely she comes apart later on). This Hamlet seems much more upset about his father's death than his mother's remarriage, which hasn't been the case in most Hamlets I've seen, where the father has generally been a grand and intimidating figure but I got little sense of connection to his son. Now we're watching the behind-the-scenes special that I didn't see before, with Tennant talking about how he hoped he got the intimacy right for the camera as opposed to on stage and Stewart saying that Tennant gets the private moments of the soliloquies just right.