by Alina Marks

Created on: January 28, 2009

The Pigeon or the Dove

It's hard to know which one came first,
the pigeon or the dove. In the beginning
it didn't matter. We were all just there,

in the frame of some universal continuance
formed into a narrow field between two
dissimilar houses and an infinite picket fence.

The blades of grass reached for my ankles
and then my fingers became the curved edges
of a bowl, shooting up toward the sun

filtered through a midnight-blue shade of ink.
In this light, I could see one milk-colored flower
flatten against the soil underneath my bare feet

and when those unnamable petals withered
and expired into the ground around me,
I could feel you, as a pigeon or a dove, dying

against the lining of my skin. The field
and its blades of grass grew until their height
could no longer straighten toward the sky

and instead, folded over me like the cusp
of an enormous wave, bringing with it
the darkness of thick curtains closing

over a stage. This is when I fell back into
waking life. Scraping the sides of its tunnel
with my dull fingernails along the way,

I arrived into the night with the solidity
of wet, open eyes and only the words,
existence is temporal,

that you had spelled out with your wings
inside the palm of my hands.

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