Poem for Friday and Brookside Geese

The Geese
By Jorie Graham

Today as I hang out the wash I see them again, a code
as urgent as elegant,
tapering with goals.
For days they have been crossing. We live beneath these geese

as if beneath the passage of time, or a most perfect heading.
Sometimes I fear their relevance.
Closest at hand,
between the lines,

the spiders imitate the paths the geese won’t stray from,
imitate them endlessly to no avail:
things will not remain connected,
will not heal,

and the world thickens with texture instead of history,
texture instead of place.
Yet the small fear of the spiders
binds and binds

the pins to the lines, the lines to the eaves, to the pincushion bush,
as if, at any time, things could fall further apart
and nothing could help them
recover their meaning. And if these spiders had their way,

chainlink over the visible world,
would we be in or out? I turn to go back in.
There is a feeling the body gives the mind
of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling

without the sense that you are passing through the one world,
that you could reach another
anytime. Instead the real
is crossing you,

your body an arrival
you know is false but can’t outrun. And somewhere in between
these geese forever entering and
these spiders turning back,

this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.

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Thursday temperatures were over 65 degrees and I can't even pretend that I miss winter, though I'm concerned what it means that the crocuses are fully purple while the daffodils are forming buds. We took a nice long walk in the park after the longest ever sales pitch that was supposed to be just a quick estimate on bathroom but now I can explain for two hours why Kohler is the very best. 

We had fake chicken alfredo for dinner and watched a couple of episodes of Jack Ryan (too many similar looking old white guys with accents, I kept getting confused who was who) around an hour near the end of The Return of the King with Kristen and chatting with my fannish friends. These are some of the geese we saw at Brookside Gardens the weekend before last: