for Gertrude Williams

According to folklore, “wild geese flying south always fly in the shape of the initial letter of the island to which they are going.”

I thought these stitches would last forever,
like her full-throated laugh that still echoes deep
through my days, the heart’s proof
of what is not forgotten.
Etched fine as black scrimshaw, her fingers, that once
snapped weevils dead in the hot Alabama sun, slipped
thread through needle through scrap
until the very end. Nothing was lost —
the cast-off shirt
became the wings of wild geese;
the red curtains were cut to size, a trail
of diamond-shaped rays.
For her, the quilt redeemed all
that was discarded, everything was repaired as something new.

But over time the threads unravel in small moments when I am glancing
elsewhere. Patches tear, hems fray, the soaring birds come undone —
the change as sudden as the betrayal of trees by a colder season.

I spread the quilt on the dining table; it is listless as a patient
under the surgeon’s “O” of light.
Spools of thread congregate, little busybodies at the scene of the crime.
My hands follow the glide and prick of her needle,
And with each stitch I make I feel
her hands resting lightly on mine.
In the laying down of pieces,
the assembly is all —
and we understand the Babel of colors, the meaning of patterns
only by stepping back.

The hardest part to get right is the perfect V of geese.
I can still recall her exhortation — “Look up! Look up!” —
to watch for the alphabet in flight.
But I would only see birds whirling like derelict leaves,
blown uncompassed from their boughs.

Now, in the narrowing hour, as the light
comes more from inside than without,
and the final seam is done,
I see what she has given me —
birds rising like a curtain, drawing heavenward to spell
her memory in the undefeated sky.

I am at the start of the line
and the hush in the cafeteria is like the muffled
dawn after a long night of snow.

We enter into silence with all the awkwardness
of travelers in a foreign country
who know they have no other choice
but to surrender
to a language that is not their own.

The most social among us try
to catch someone’s fleeting glance
or to meet smile with smile,
while others avoid
the eyes of those they have laughed with
only yesterday, when speech was
such a common thing it could be taken
for granted, like the air or atoms.

But in this other world of nontalk
the slightest sound becomes subversive —
a shoe scuffing against the floor,
the silvery crash of a dropped fork.
The most experienced retreatants move
as if walking under water
and I feel myself slowing down just watching them.

In this state of — what? — grace? wonder? mind?
I find myself
standing in front of the pizza counter
and the curly-haired young man who has waited on me before
asks me what I want
and I can’t tell him.
To let go of words is harder than I expected —
it’s the boat that comes unmoored
and drifts away as I watch from the pier
grasping for ropes that are out of reach.
But something fires a light in his deep-set eyes
like stars that are struck alive
in the dark harbor of the sky,
and with the devotion of a Buddhist priest
setting out offering bowls, he places
his bowls in a neat row before me —
tomato sauce, cheeses, mushrooms, spinach, oregano —
and I point and nod yes to the ones I want.
Suddenly, the young man is in retreat with me
as we give up words for the deeper miracle
of meeting halfway to dance
on an unfamiliar shore.

When he brings the finished pizza to me
he lowers his eyes modestly
and his smile opens as gently as petals
surprising the spring.

The choice seemed consequential only
a week ago — would I finally get it right? —
remember that it was whole
wheat instead of multi and what kind of fancy swirl? —
but now I could pick the wrong one and it wouldn’t make any difference
at all. Except I can’t
for the life of me choose the loaf I should. Not now.
So I stand in the bread aisle like a sentenced
man deciding on my last meal, and trying to keep this decision
as simple as it ought to be
while the packages trick the eye with their redundancy,
each tie twisted so tightly it would take forever to open them up,
and the Christmas carol music keeps jingjingjing-a-linging
and the hurried moms
take their loaves from the shelves and can’t imagine
why someone isn’t doing this for me, isn’t taking care
of the chores and the meals and the million other
little things so I don’t have to be out
in the middle of all this, so I can just be home
where I belong, but do not want to be,
where loss multiplies in every room,
in the thousand things that are not
touched, and the footsteps that will not come
to greet me to see if maybe this time
I finally got the bread
right.

For Paul and Maxine

It is the precise
moment between the given
and the unknowable—
the slip of time that, like an island,
juts into view, announcing its strangeness
before we know what is to come.

We sit, the four of us at a table
in a crowded restaurant on a clear spring
day and in the pause
before the words tumble fast from my friend’s mouth,
I feel a sudden pull toward
an inevitability that must be someone else’s, and yet
is not.

The brief silence before words
is when the true knowing occurs—
amid the gleam of sunlight on silverware,
the white of the starched tablecloth,
a worry intrudes
like the stealth slide of something in the grass,
a subtle dawning of knowledge that gains
ground and changes everything.

The calm before the storm
is not really calm at all, but is filled with a stirring,
a gathering force
that is its own dread.
And so, when the words do come
on that plain blue day,
and our lives are no longer what we thought they would be,
the folly of certainty
looms large
in our new given of each tiny unknown.

Something shifts underfoot
as the train jolts and slides in a long
screech of wheels braking
too late.
You and I sit, presents on our laps,
and stare at our watches, adding up
how late we will be.
A man across the aisle slams his paper down and sighs.
Then the lights flicker out
and the train hisses, a final breath escaping.

We are still, stopped blank as a clock, in the middle
of somewhere too dark to see.
Outside, flashlights zigzag,
throwing off light
like lines being cast haphazardly into the black pools of night.
In the glancing chaos
we can make out hunched bodies, heaving
something—what?—a deer,
closed in on itself, a folding
of limb upon limb in a kind of prayer.
It sags in their arms as if it has been dragged from the sea,
bones surprised by the stealth velocity of steel.

We do not speak of it
in the awakened fluorescence that makes us plain
as the train moves slowly on
but our bodies know what they have felt—
the unexpected seizure, sudden and subtle,
rising to meet our pulse,
the imperceptible letting go
that will not let us go.