Listen to Matt Donovan read this poem.

for Greg Gibson

Or at least part of it. But is that what you’d want to know?
How I was standing in the checkout with my groceries
when I saw the opening words of Mary Oliver’s poem
written across a sunset rendered as a peach-colored square
cluttered with wing-flapping geese? You do not have to be,
I read, and assumed the word good was tucked out of sight,
as it often is, hidden by the folds of a canvas bag being filled
with kale, kombucha, and shrimp, all gliding a few feet
on a conveyor belt operated by a cashier named Ben.
Reader, there have been times when I’ve wanted to say
Fuck those geese, given how they’re everywhere—T-shirts,
greeting cards, and now this bag, always soaring across
the same sky, honking now and forever, calling to us, sure,
I suppose, but also just doing what geese do. Then again,
birds are never to blame for cash grabs—that’s just our way
of making the world offer itself to the imagination.
Maybe it’s your desert island poem, in which case, my bad.
Or maybe the two of us have shared the thought, Please,
enough with the goddamn geese. Either way, “Wild Geese”
will never stop inviting us to exchange feelings of despair.
Once, I sat across from a man at a café, both of us diving into
Niçoise salads, both of us sipping chilled rosé as he told me
about his son who’d been shot and killed thirty years before.
Or rather, he told me about how he was taking time to learn
how to shoot a gun in the hope of mastering what had given him
the most pain. I listened, then tore off some baguette, and
didn’t know what to offer in return. Oh Lord, Patsy Cline said,
as if explaining her voice to god, I sing just like I hurt inside.
I hadn’t known Patsy Cline would appear in this poem, but
here we are nonetheless. Instead, I’d planned to describe
what I’d felt upon seeing a tub of snickerdoodle hummus
begin its short-lived glide toward the wide peachy spaces
between the tote bag’s words, all to what end I didn’t know.
I’ll never know if Patsy Cline planned that last moment
in “Faded Love” when everything stops and, in that silence
between the title’s two words, there’s a rasp of breath that
becomes a sob before the song returns, finding its foothold
in the final chord as her voice wavers and dips. Either way,
if you care to listen, that song carries the sound of a heart
being stomped and someone dropping to their knees.
Long ago, after a night of hearing Mary Oliver read her work,
I watched her at the reception stroll toward a courtyard
and, until I noticed the cigarette in her hand, assumed
she’d felt overcome by the urge to stand beneath the endless
pinprick of stars. Prayer, she wrote, is paying attention, then
patching together some words, meaning you don’t have to be
in the pinewoods hoping deer will nibble from your palm.
You could be at Whole Foods, or beneath the trembling
leaves of an aspen, not really looking at anything at all
as slices of almond cake in your honor begin to move
around the space inside and each time you lift a Marlboro
to your lips, the intake of breath offers a crimson flare.
Reader, you’ve likely noticed that neither of us has yet given
voice to our own desperation, although your silence here
is understandable. Instead, I can tell you that as the geese
and their crappy sunset left the store, Ben the cashier
took up that divider thing that announces one’s place in line
and, as a means of summoning me forward, asked What’s up?
Arugula, apparently, olives, and dark chocolate I bought
on a whim since that’s what the soft animal of my body desired.
Meanwhile, the world goes on, as does Mary Oliver’s poem
before it concludes with a different invitation, which is merely
to listen to the sounds of the earth and, in so many words,
ask what it might mean. I don’t mean to pilfer a sadness
that belongs to someone else, but I need to tell you about
the time when the man whose son had been killed stood
in the graveyard, trying to summon forth a prayer, until
there was a sound from an oak tree in the neighboring field
that was like nothing he’d ever heard. It came from a hole
about the size of his wrist—a cooing, a gurgling moan. Maybe
it was a type of weasel, he thought, or some other animal
tucked inside. He was a man alone in a field, hearing sounds
pouring forth from the darkness in a hole in a tree, and
he didn’t know what it meant, or what it was, or what to do,
but he stayed there listening for a long time all the same.