The Wild Geese

to my husband

An unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.
—David Deutsch

I.
Rough work, hanging out
laundry in desert wind.
I got caught up in it.
Simple chore versus
crazed local element,
favored to win.
I moved clothespins
in strategic haste,
clamping in place
fresh-washed fabric
dripping spring chill.
Gusts slapped cloth
at my face, wrapped
it ’round my arms.
I wanted it done. And so,
I nearly missed them.

Before seeing, I heard.
A voice of the air. One voice,
two birds. Geese, a pair,
seeking mown fields to settle
down for the cold March night.
One had just said something
(that I’d heard) to the other.
The other replied in wing beats
of side-by-side flight.

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Dead Horse Point by Patricia Karamesines

Dead Horse Point–photo by Nikater, released into public domain

The weedy clouds of spring
Grow on the peaks, break off then drift
In tall gardens over sandstone blue
With the bruise of squalls. I stand
Two thousand feet above the coils
Of a river that has burnt its way,
Leaving behind the red stubble
Of canyons.  Buds of lightning
Burst and wither at once;
The air is rutted with breezes;
Stones lie where they fell cracking
At the roots of cliffs.  The land
Twists through bands of light,
Like a juniper through soils, at the sun,
And if my blood did not burn, like the river,
The clays of its country, I would see
The horizon ripple with growth.
Here I am only slightly longer-lived
Than the lightning; I may not last
The next stone’s throwing.

Evidence of Flight

by Patricia Karamesines
for Brad K.

And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.
~Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Dragonfly by Pearson Scott Foresman public domain

Chancy, is flight, an omen’s
flutter in the unsettled air
from angles where we least
expect a challenge. Invention,
they say, of primordial insects
aspiring to high haven above
raking tooth and claw. Accident,
is flight, of last-chance leaps
to crest battlements of gravity’s
grubbing keep. That such least
creatures found loopholes in
law pillorying them to their
places in a food chain. Then
in their thoraxes, more frangible
than flesh, composed arias
of survival, buzzing themselves
loose. The miracle, is flight,
when four hundred million years
ago, some humble bug got itself
wings, and with wings, ascension.
Hard thing it may be to admit,
the humankind taking credit
for all triumphs over nature,
but, with flight, some strain
of early dragon-just-turned-fly
choreographed the first steps of
the dance away, escape velocity.