A man and a gander settle their relationship in under twenty lines, and neither comes out of it looking especially dignified. That is the charm of Gerry Gilbert's "Longlands." It takes a small yard-side truce, a gander that for once doesn't hiss, and treats it with the seriousness usually kept for diplomacy or marriage.
The opening is a little muddled. "I hear / the gander didn't hiss at me" sounds like hearsay, as if news of the truce had reached the speaker secondhand. Then he questions himself: "Was it me? no / it was the gander. / It was me. yes." Question, answer, correction and reversal pile up until he can't say who did the recognizing. The confusion is the point. By the time we reach "we have recognized each other," the grammar has turned two separate creatures into a pair.
What follows is comedy built on symmetry. "He expects me to carry food. I / expect him to carry food." The line break leaves the "I" dangling at the end of the line, so the mirror image arrives a beat late, like the speaker catching on to how absurd the arrangement is. Neither is satisfied, and the speaker's reaction is to claim an edge: "I think / I am smarter than he is." The "I think" gives him away. Only someone who needs the point settled would raise it, and the gander has no say.
The poem moves through a small ladder of verbs: "I hear," "I see," "Of course," "I know." Each opens a new phase, from sensing to judging to something like understanding. In the middle phase the speaker's vanity comes out. "I see / he has more fucking than I have" is the only coarse moment, and it is delivered flatly, as an observation with no apology. The man's comeback is touchingly weak: "I am not as proud / but I say my walk is more elegant." The words "I say" admit that this is a boast, not a fact. He concedes the gander's pride and then claims style as a consolation prize.
Then the poem changes pace. "I know / fear and caution / we need / still / altogether / we have lived in the same yard." The lines shrink to a word or two, the punctuation drops away, and the joking stops. The syntax is ambiguous. Does he know fear and caution, or know that they need them? "Still" can mean "nevertheless" or "motionless." "Altogether" can mean "entirely" or "all together." Judging by these lines, the truce rests on wary respect as much as affection, which makes sense for a bird that can hiss. The only reason offered for the peace is plain: "we have lived in the same yard." If the title names that place, as it seems to, then the whole poem rests on the idea that sharing a patch of ground is enough to create a bond.
The ending is "I am bigger. / He is whiter." These are two short statements in the same shape, and the arguing is over. "Smarter" and "more elegant" were contestable claims. "Bigger" and "whiter" are things anyone can see. The speaker has stopped competing and started describing, and the comparison now seems fair, even affectionate. Whiteness may nudge some readers to think about people as well as birds, but the poem doesn't push this, and it is safest to say the line is open to that reading.
The form carries the tone. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The rhythm is that of someone talking to himself, in short declaratives and mostly one-syllable words. Without rhyme to polish them, the lines keep a deadpan quality, and the joke lands because nothing announces it. The repeated "I" and "he" keep the two characters in constant balance.
The poem matters because it avoids the usual ways of writing about animals. The gander is not a cute symbol or a source of moral lessons. He is a neighbour with his own expectations, appetites and pride, and the speaker is willing to look foolish alongside him. Underneath the humour is an honest idea: many relationships, human ones included, are made of mutual demands, small vanities, cautious tolerance and a shared place to live. The poem sees all that in a man and a gander, and it does so without raising its voice.