Iris

Blue is the color of you.

Like water, the Puget Sound

all crystalline and endless shimmer. 

I remember driving up Highway 101 with you

the Sound to our left, east-like

a giant never-ending plate of glass

as cobalt and honorable as your eyes.

Funny sounding Native names 

like Chimicum

dotted the roadside and old pine 

firework stands sat rotting away in April's rain.

Almost to Port Townsend

a lake on the right, to the East where

hundreds of Canadian geese flocked 

and flew 

and lived,

and here a place

you found joy.

I remember when you made this discovery

how excited you were

and we drove there together

and we watched them fly in

great aerial waves of white and silver and cerulean,

swarming above, a great
silent blessing.

I never cared much about birds before,

let alone Canadian geese. But you had learned 

to love them then,

to see the beauty in their winged dance.
So too then, did I.

And then,
then you died...

and there they were.

Everywhere above me,

all of sudden it seemed the geese,

and the pidgeons, and

the seagulls and 

the blackbirds.

All of them

flew by me, in front of me,

around me and above me in large swoops and 

V formations and I wondered then what I know now,

was it a sign?

Maybe you were still nearby. 

Tonight I sat in the bathtub 

thinking about what a hard winter it's been.

Feeling slightly lost, confused

and alone.

I wasn't thinking about you right then,

not really. I was reading 

one of my many dozen poetry anthologies

and I came across this poem

and then I thought of those Canadian geese

and of birds

and of you

and I felt again like I do whenever I see 

them flying above me, that 
maybe you are here somewhere after all, 

taking away my breath
and guiding me home...

Not Swans

by Susan Ludvigson

I drive toward distant clouds and my mother's dying.

The quickened sky is mercury, it slithers

across the horizon. Against the liquid silence,

a V of birds crosses-sudden and silver.

They tilt, becoming white light as they turn, glitter

like shooting stars arcing slow motion out of the abyss,

not falling.

Now they look like chips of flint,

the arrow broken.

I think. This isn't myth-

they are not sings, not souls.

Reaching blue 

again, they're ordinary ducks or maybe

Canadian geese. Veering away they shoot 

into the west, too far for my eyes, aching

as they do.

Never mind what I said

before. Those birds took my breath. I new what it meant.