combing through "Visitation" by Eamon Grennan

      Even when I went back in time into the archives on Poetry Daily to search for a poem that I liked, this recent poem by Eamon Grennan struck me the most. It was easy for me to draw the scene and the imagery in my head, as well as assume the mind state of the author. I don’t mean to say that Eamon Grennan is feminine, but when I first read the poem, I imagined a female describing the scene and asking the questions. I wonder if this is because I can imagine myself being in this exact same situation observing something unusual but beautiful and questioning why or how, or why not all the time. (I had a similar experience when I stepped out of my house and the sun was low, but shining really bright and all the light simply seeped out from between tree branches and everything was in this tint of honey. It’s hard to describe and I’ve never seen the sunlight like that before. It was an escaping moment, of which I have taken a mental picture) I was really able to jump into the poem because of Eamon’s descriptive very real wording. No words are there for fanciness or style. It seems to just come out of him, raw but real, and that is why I, a reader, am able to assume the position of “I” or perhaps the reader becomes the “you” that joins him as “we.”
     It’s funny how geese flying in the air can have more even and symmetrical formations than a dance team with spike tape on the floor. This is an evident observation of the author’s as he describes the flock “bent into a flexed bow” and “moving as one.” However with no need for excess description, because generally, we’ve all seen flocks migrate south (either in life or on some media) and can conjure up the image without fault. It’s the phenomenon of the lit up geese that the author spends the most time describing, because it’s something he wants to share with us and draw out since we do not have this moment in our mental film and cannot conjure up such imagery. In fact he spends most of the poem contemplating how the bellies of the geese were lit with warm tones, though it was a winter night and the sky was probably black without moonlight.
     Grennan’s descriptions were reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop’s characteristic ability to see the beautiful in the normally-not-so-beautiful. They’re not the same, I was only reminded; but in fact, they may be very different. At first read, I felt as though the descriptions of the color were beautiful, warm and of a sunny, wheat-colored shade. But after closer read, the shade of lighting is actually quite darker, colder. It’s not golden, but “of tarnished gold,” worn and aged. Then, the color of “dead oak leaves hanging still in sunshine,” or tall reads shone with light in the winter alludes to the winter “December dark” we are currently in. The oak leaf is dead and hanging as if holding on, while others have fallen off due to the changing season, and the tall reeds though splashed with lights are enduring winter, frail, maybe wilted. They’re all beautiful, almost quaint, images; they just have hints of melancholy in them.
      Throughout the poem I feel a common theme of fickleness or unknown. Cycles are always fickle, always changing from fall to winter to spring to summer. So, present in the poem are the changing seasons, the months, the time of day, and with all those cycles come and go the migrating geese who are “winging it,” perhaps improvising? And if not improvising then flying which is also change in altitude, speed, direction, and whether or not one is flying. Only for a minute or two do we get to see the geese before they fly out of our sight, “gone dark, gone on.” We also see the tarnishing gold, which cannot remain in a state of pure gold, but changes over time. Then of course we see there is no moonshine. As we are told by Juliet, the moon is fickle, one night there, full and bright, then another night gone. Even the title of the poem, “visitation” is a temporary stay, a fickle moment.
     Overall, I liked this poem, because it brought me somewhere, on a little journey and then to someplace different than I was before reading the poem. The author didn’t just take me and describe the scene and then leave me there. He took me, pointed at the sky, took me inside to show me his cat, then outside to look up then down on earth, then up to no moonlight, then swept across the sky to find no longer geese but darkness and finally paused to look back at the minute or two. We were just a miniscule passing, a place of visitation to the geese, whereas the geese to us were this image and phenomenon that had indeed passed us but would forever reverberate as a unique memory.