Sight Lines


Like an interior storm
roiling the top floor room, the trapped dove,
eddying feathers floorward from above
the sill and table, rattles
the glass, assaulting
the window, beating and beating against the pane
as if it could break through.
But its view
deceives: those hurrying clouds, those ranks
of roofs and chimney tops
recede to inviting distances.
Beyond the window, other birds
idle along the gusts, wings motionless,
while this dove panics, fooled. Its once soft
calls—the gentle, falling
four beat trills of temperate mourning—
scatter in shrieks, high pitched and stuttering,
as it flounders, certain
that nothing bars its escape, not even
the dove it sees there in the glass.

From Anatomical Venus (Word Press 2004).