POETRY

By Sheila Black

The year I spent a month in Denver vis­it­ing my daugh­ter in the eating dis­or­der hospital

the closest com­pan­ions were the geese who flocked the con­crete islands between the too-wide roads.

Some nights it was only fairy tales I under­stood: the blood on the snow, the idea of bread crumbs,

or the bright bone that sings by which I mean I under­stood I loved her and this might not be enough,

but it was the only stone I had in my pocket. Often, when I slept, I dreamed of the geese, which I

kept con­fus­ing for swans—at least as far as my dream-version fairy­tales in which I transformed

the Canada geese I saw all around into the birds in the fairy­tale about the girl whose brothers

are put under a spell that gives them wings and beaks. She alone must save them through love

and letting her fingers bleed, weaving for each one a shirt of nettles because an old woman has told

her a story that this alone will release them. Perhaps not the nettles so much as the persistence

of being able to erase your will, to do a thing that seems hope­less and for a long time. I rode each

day back and forth to the hos­pi­tal. Once a pair of geese bit at my ankles as I waited at the bus stop.

The geese in Denver were described to me not infre­quent­ly as a plague, a pesti­lence, the way they

clus­tered around, their endless pecking and gabbing, Yet at night they lifted me when nothing else did—

the clear arrow of their flight, the shape they held with such con­stan­cy, which depend­ed on pure

coop­er­a­tion, each bird switch­ing out so the others could rest a little—even there in the sky.

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by Barth Bailey.