For Cynthia
There. A flock of geese flickering

across the morning sun. They’re late

in heading south, I’d say.

My mind wanders; what’s the collective noun

for these particular birds?

Something more to Google. (A wedge.)

I tell my students that Shakespeare

decided to divide a person’s life by seven

and all his plays into acts: five.

How many acts will we play?

Doing my grandmother’s hair,

because my mother asked me to,

because they said I was good with Nana’s hair

white-blue and stiff with

Ozone Fluid Net and weeks of treatments

meaning that I was good with Nana

and good with Nana as with nobody else

not that I expected her to tell me

any wisdom or anything

because as far as I could see

wisdom came from Disney characters.

She said to me, “I still feel the same,”

the same as she always was.

Here, we look back and ahead

always planning the next act,

one ear forever cocked

to the music of the spheres.

Me, I heard a hinge moment:

birds leaving one place,

striving toward another

in unpredictable seasons.

Nancy Keating‘s poems have been published in New Letters, The Southampton Review, Gettysburg Review, Carolina Quarterly, New American Writing and elsewhere, and she has been anthologized. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has an MFA from Stony Brook University and teaches at Farmingdale State College.