All this week we’ve heard the geese, so high their voices seem directionless, everywhere or nowhere. But today I spy a rangy mass tangling and untangling, weightless knot whose strings shift and weave in seeming disorder, the whole mass writhing and calling, a flung tangle of loose ends billowing, not a vee among them. I sit in my car, windows down to better hear them, pummeled by late February gusts, counting down the minutes, telling myself it’s nothing to be unprepared, I can think on my feet, the students won’t smell my hesitation and turn on me like jackals. It’s nothing to feel hollow and windblown, your confidence scrubbed raw like filthy parking lot snow refusing to vanish, it doesn’t matter that the tenured professor next door sneers and looks away when I greet him in the hall, and I remember my father saying the worst, most shameless bickering he ever faced was when he was a teacher, my father who, one day, pulled off his shirt and leaned in so I could see and touch the small rectangle imbedded beneath the skin of his left pectoral: Isn’t that amazing, he said softly. It was the size of a bar of hotel soap. It gave us eight more years with him. The geese have gone upriver; now it’s just the wind. My dear father who daily sank into his chair like an astronaut preparing for departure, loving this earth he knew he would be leaving. What of anything I have to do today could ever be so hard?
Ron Mohring is the author of Survivable World, winner of the Washington Prize, and of four chapbooks. He is the heart and soul of Seven Kitchens Press.
