Day Eleven

Title: if only your hands did not resemble wings

Was playing with taping off sections of canvas and came up with this. The verdict is still out. Comments?

The poem is a strange one. It comes from some experimentation last semester after reading the likes of Dean Young and Maxine Kumin. We were working on the love poem in its platonic form - love poems for friends, animals, places. If you think writing a non-love love poem sounds easy, try it.

Well, at the start of class one day around this time of writing the non-love love poems, a moth flew into the classroom and our professor mistook it for a bird and started freaking out. Picture a tall, boyish woman in her thirties, tough, stringy, fierce. Doesn't take anything lying down. Now picture her freaking out over a small pair of wings. No one understood. Finally, she explained that she has fear of birds and that the previous semester, a bird had flown into the classroom and gotten stuck fluttering around the light fixtures. To keep herself from completely losing it, she said, she promptly moved everyone into another room.

What I remember, that day the moth flew into our class, was her saying: you just wait to see what happens to me when the bird flies in.

And I wondered - so, what does happen?

***

Greatest Fear

And what happens when the bird flies in?
I would like to imagine you will
turn a new shade of flustered, more
awkward and lovely, all girl, all
fluttering over a small winged thing.

I get that it’s not just a bird.
I get that the universal symbol for fear
is a sparrow.
I get your defiance.

If only your hands did not resemble
wings. Your heart, that feathered vessel
shaped for flight. If only.