We are either too early or too latewhen we set out across the cattail marsh-lands looking for the Snow geeseI have promised you. It is colderthan I prepared for, wind gustspushing our bodies from behind,and the sun does not warm usenough. There are days I categorizeas failed. When I lie downon the floor among dinosaursand dolls, close my eyes andpretend I'm dead, while my childrengo about their lives, thencome pouncing on the raftof my open heart. There I amat forty-five, and all I can hearis my daughter saying I'm making youalive. And here we are, on a morningwhen the clouds seem sketched againstthe blue to save us from the ideathat it could be perfect, still-flowering jewelweed along the banks,an inflorescence of woolgrass andbristly sedge, the creek wendingnorthward, all the way to the city,flowing into the lake that separates usfrom another country where I once dancedat the gay bar until morningbecause I could. Migration,I tell my daughter, is like going home.It is a mystery to me, what comesinto focus for her, or does not.The nature poem embellishes.It takes the memory of this pictureand turns it outward so that we arethe only disruption in a world of harddata: orange mountain litfrom within, godforsaken field and themachinery of human defeat. Once,this place was an ocean. Can't you feel it,I want to ask her, but when I scanthe scene, she is already drifting.How many other promiseswon't I be able to keep? Whenwill she want to know whereshe came from? Three geese take refuge.There were supposed to be thousandsof them. They were supposed to put ona show for us.