Archive
Virgin Appears on Highway Viaduct
The geese have no idea
they are performing a miracle
but the weekend joggers
stop, transfixed:
Can they really walk on water?
My father didn’t
rise from the dead, either—
it just seemed that way,
between the garbled message
(no one said the EKG was flat,
that’s just what I heard) and the fear
that attends on eighty years.
And like the geese
who feel the solidity of ice
beneath the skim of water,
he took his resurrection
for granted, grumbling that he wanted
to go home, there was nothing
wrong. Nothing on the cement of the viaduct
except a water stain, nothing to celebrate
when the geese make it safely to shore, when my father
calls to complain that the power’s out again;
nothing but the daily turn of the skies
above us, and the moment each year
when the lagoon is covered in ice,
before the moment each year when the ice
melts into water and the geese can swim again.
by Susanna Lang
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Daylight Saving Time
Yesterday the field stretched away from the road,
empty except for the broken stalks of last year’s crop.
Today it is filled with arrivals and departures.
For now, the light stays later, but so does the dark.
Yesterday the tree was silent; today it sings.
High in the branches, an abandoned wasp nest peels back its layers.
A car pulls up to the stoplight, corner of Randall and Big Timber Road.
On its bumper: Lithuania in NATO.
In six years, the driver has not seen another issue
worth the effort to clean his bumper and replace the sticker.
He remembers late winter lingering in that other place,
the same dry stalks, the same blur of wings;
but the farmhouse was of stone, the barn still in use.
When the light changes, the line of traffic moves forward
and the geese stir and rise, stir and rise.
This may not be the right field.
It may not be the right time.
by Susanna Lang
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qarrtsiluni 