Imminent Domains by Alessandra Naccarato

Author:Alessandra Naccarato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Published: 2022-10-04T23:50:57+00:00

Wayfinding

(air)

All that you touch you Change.

All that you Change, Changes you.

The only lasting truth is Change.

—Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Flock Memory

Meanwhile, the wild geese, high up in that clean blue air, are heading home again.

—Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

Growing up, I kept my distance from Canada geese. Some kid told they me could break my femur with their beaks, and that was it for me. We were on a field trip to the Toronto Islands that day and the geese were everywhere, in flocks by the dozens. They would never get out of your way, no matter how fast you ran toward them. The ground was covered in their small pellet droppings: every spring and summer, in every park in the city. As girls, we had to say ew-ew-ew, as we ran from the pellets, as our classmates watched and laughed. I played along, but I didn’t really think it was gross. The small pellets looked just like earth. And that’s what they were: earth digested; earth returned. Ew-ew-ew: ecosystem, species system, fertilizer. Those geese weren’t great for the lake, but they were the reason the grass came back each spring.

We went to the island often in spring and summer, because my mother’s best friend lived in a small cottage-style house there. We didn’t have enough money to leave the city, but we could afford the two-dollar ferry across the lake. The summer crowds on the island were endless though, and they did a number on the flocks: sliding their bread into the ecosystem, domesticating the geese for a season. They treated them like one of the attractions, like the small Ferris wheel they went there to ride. Watching all that commotion, my fear of the geese grew. But the truth was, I loved them in equal measure. Or rather, I loved to see them leave: the moment they’d unfold their black wings, honk, and rise over the lake to join one another. In fall, when the air was cold enough to feel it on your lips, to taste it, and you had to wear a second sweater; in October when you could watch their V move against the half-light of dusk, heading toward a perpetual summer—I loved them for that.

I wasn’t a happy child. It moved me to watch them take off, the way a road trip did: like we might go on, like there might be a path—a current, a sky—that went on forever, that meant we didn’t have to return to our life, our house, our feelings, or at least not for a very long time. I pointed to the sky when I watched them go, and felt awe in my chest with an equal measure of longing. I wanted to leave, to run away from home—alone if I had to. But geese don’t do it alone. That’s the first lesson of migration they teach you in grade school: for the flock to cross long distances, they need to work together.

Geese take turns at the crown of the V—guiding, creating uplift for the birds behind them.

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