The Snow Geese on Enceladus
By Sarah Lawrence Sandkvist
I am a woman like the snow geese on Enceladus.
When I look at them through my telescope, they are always flying; curve of pink bill cutting through waves of ice, the furious, silent beat of frozen wings.
They never seem to land, snow fine as smoke grasping at their feet, curling through rough ribbons of air. I come to them on diasporic nights, when the loneliness is closer than I am to myself. Kneeling before my telescope, the absence in me opens its mouth when my eye touches them: swallow whole.
And there is no escaping the pull. The snow geese fight it with every feather and turn, warmed by the work in spite of the frozen world beneath them and the naked space above. It is only the brightest midwinter on this body. The frigid wind that whips through clouds to slash against the feathered back. But they greet me with their fresh and throaty trumpet cries, turning under the feel of my eye from our distance. Knowing that I am a woman like the snow geese on Enceladus.
Through the madness of snow spat into space there are too many to count, and though I’ve wanted to give them names, the miserable connection between us won’t let me. They must be a family, the leader of the skein always ready to call to those behind, the last of the inherited pearls that trail along the string. A thick neck leads to the soft slope of back and black wingtips that announce their path through the air—the beak’s grinning patch seems a fracture from such distance, a broken bill panting, muscles burning beneath feathers.
I am looking into the past, and can only hope they have settled now, but the moon is made of spires of ice, and to land, to home, would be crucifixion.
I can’t leave them. There they are, the multitude of unknowns and uncertainties that break the body, the consuming avarice for the things that I know will hurt me, that frighten me; the things without resolution that go on living. Fear for the end of eternal things, fear of finite and infinite, unknown things. Fear that doesn’t exist until the reminder floats in on a young thought. In such an inhuman place as space, my own gaze repulsive and wrong—the way things exist on an impossible scale of incomprehensible distance—and I don’t know how I’ve come to be here, with this need to see them again. But it is always there, the seedy desperation in my wait for sunset, a need that gnaws at me, carnivorous cannibalistic, starving for something inside. To see them again, to know that they are there, they are solid, they are heat in ungrateful cold, they are like me, and they are on their way home, home.
But there is no warmth to fly to, no living marsh to burry a beak in and chatter up roots.
Only the sting of ice on the wind, on the wing.
And when I pull away from my telescope, I’m alone. I can’t reach far enough, my telescope can’t bring me far enough from here. The trouble isn’t being born a woman when I’m not. It’s being born a body when I’m not. And to be a woman is to be more of a body than a man. But I am a woman like the snow geese on Enceladus and I was born bodiless for just a moment before the wrong correction brought me here. Perhaps it's a symptom, to see eyes where there is nothing. To fear them and create them to satisfy the thought, that I might disappear if there's no one to watch me, if there is no return to my actions in the world, if the wind moves through me instead of parting around me because there is no mouth there to say, "I desire you," even when desire might erase me. No, I am a woman like the snow geese on Enceladus, and they know me, they welcome me, they call, “Shelter.”
For a week of Thursdays I go without sleep, frozen before my telescope.
My heart beats only once an hour, an hour, and an hour. There they are, shining.
The idea builds a home in me softly, feather touches on the tips of my fingers, until it is a wound, teeth sharp and torn. It twines itself around the absence in me, around the understanding that if I were sliced open as one does the pale belly of a fish, you might find only the miserable idea of a bird, monstrous and mired in tar. I feel the sweat glide behind my ear and so the knowledge lives, clumsily, in the thought of a thought. The hours-off sunrise at my back, and I see. The snow geese haven’t moved.
And here I’ve been begging, “Come down from there.”
My eyes are not enough.
They never land. The rippling wing is an illusion created by the falling snow. Unnatural suspension; frozen, foreign specimens. And I’m alone, leaning against naked air, raw knees pressing into the carpet before a telescope, pointed through a windowpane beginning to fog up in the most rootless part of the night. This is the glove lost in the snow that doesn’t return in the spring’s snowmelt, rotten tubers pulled from mud by starving fingers, this silence—the image not false, but me. They must have been so soft, once.
How could you leave me so far from myself?
The snow geese on Enceladus died a long time ago.
Sarah Lawrence Sandkvist is a writer based out of Somerville, Massachusetts. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 2018 with a degree in English Literature and Language and now works as a writer/editor. A writer of fiction and poetry, she takes inspiration from nature, folk stories, and her Swedish heritage.