Geese (for P.D. Eastman)
Geese. Big geese. Little geese.
Geese on holiday, crowding
the retention ponds. Goose-
stepping the sidewalks and
sewered real-estate.
Geese in the winter fields,
picking cobs clean. Catching
Zs, their necks holstered thick
as drainpipes in fluff.
Geese flying. Flying past
the blinking radio towers.
Lapping the strip-malls
in sloppy lines. “Me first.”
“No, me.” Geese flying low.
Making cats cackle pointlessly
from their window seats.
Geese, honking like bass saxes.
Turbulent. Gritty. More bull
than bird. A free-jazz outfit
beating the headwinds, snapping
black shadows over the golf course.
Mean geese. A student rolls her
jeans to show a bite mark,
purplish and round; their teeth
are picket rows, and when
they hiss their tongues arc up
and out, like cresting dune-worms.
Today one swelled big as Zeus
before me, lassoed to a neighbor’s
mailbox. It thrashed, bleated, then
fell still, bushed.
Its beak parted soundlessly as I
scooted past. Yet when I returned,
armed with scissors and utility gloves,
only feathers were there; snapped
puddles of fishing rope.
• • •
Ryan Hibbett is an Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. His creative and critical work explores the intersections of poetry and popular culture. He is the author of Philip Larkin, Popular Culture, and the English Individual (2019) and editor of Lit-Rock: Literary Capital in Popular Music (2022). He also makes experimental music under the monikers Midwest Sound Museum and Gutta Percha.