A heavenly racket of honking calling both south and north
of here as I pulled up home to end a rainy night’s drive
and yet I could not see the geese at all in the cloudy sky.
The noise went on and on, thirty minutes more
swelling loud and fading and yet I could not find them.
Opening my bedroom window at last and leaning out
like a figure on the prow of a ship my eyes at last trained
themselves to see the faint white lines filaments
moving high across the sky like lines on some
ghostly map, one after another and another.
Snow geese. Never had I seen any kind of
thing for they came across and across in
such numbers oh thousands certainly
their loud cacophony such that you would have
thought them just above the trees. And ah there
was my mistake expecting to see a thing only
where my ear told me to look, stubbornly
blind to what was true.
At last my eye opened wider.