Have You Eaten?

Mine is not breakfast,

it is lunch

and

I am at the Marina.

I have a sweet roll,

a cup of cheap coffee

and a moment to share

with the geese.

Winged beasts of a good size

strut past,

their young miming grace,

feigning interest, following,

doing what they must

and not considering it.

Was there, ever,

a truer paradise?

Sunday, someone reads from

books that

others like him have written,

he peers over his spectacles,

he makes outlandish

claims.

He is looking down

from a make-believe height.

He says that paradise was

lost,

to a simple meal,

a snack,

to unsanctioned curiousity,

to a woman who

robbed life from

a man.

Geese,

and their progeny,

eat what is in front of them,

walk where the webbed foot

leads. They can’t read

the ‘Don’t Walk’ sign,

blaming nothing and no one for

existence.

Nature,

God’s direct line,

God’s little red phone,

drives their heartbeats.

Then,

time pushes the wings out,

until air does what it does.

The man with the books

rolls his eyes

toward

an invisible heaven

of magical proportions,

offers apology every

Sunday.

He doesn’t hear the phone

playing its sweet tune.

He is too busy tasting and

misunderstanding

that which is thought to be

the fruit of

the tree of.

Geese would laugh,

to know this.

Theirs,

and mine for a moment,

is paradise,

nothing more nor less.