Gigi Marks
Gigi Marks lives with her family on a small farm near the western edge of Cayuga Lake, in New York State. She has worked as an educator, independent scholar, editor, and conservationist. Her writing includes four books of poetry that have developed within the sustained relationship of family in and around the countryside of the Finger Lakes region, Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’–the lands of the Cayuga people. Her most recent book of poems, Territory, was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2018. http://territorypoems.org
Spring is Geese
But winter is ice. The fluid world
gone steady and solid. Look at the places
we can easily walk, where we would
usually slowly dip ourselves in,
and look at the sharp teeth that set
around crevasses, the fragile, thin plates
that set at other edges, and on
steps, so fine a layer that we do not
see it, find ourselves catching at air,
off balance. Spring is just one season
away, full of flying and smacking
into watery lakes and puddles.
But now look how we glide and spin,
stand on the great block of it,
on the slippery mass that forms for us.
To Be
Under their flight, so that
you see their feet tucked up against
their otherwise extended bodies,
there is the great song of them,
honking, the always calling between
each other, flying with each other;
it is a quick thing to watch them
pass near and close, gray and white,
and to find them gone from the huge sky.
You are, I want to tell you,
not alone on this brown earth,
even if you have been left without
any geese singing, without any flying,
without any trace of them left.
Sheila-Na-Gig online 