Wings

When they cut me open, the wings will appear. The fledglings will gulp in the blue red air, stretch feathered hollowness, flutter past ebb and flow and find the world. 

Gulp and stretch and flutter and flap. And gone? 

Or circle round and come back.

Or circle round and bring more thread. 

Or circle round this sacred dam, crumble the stones around it, 

release

all 

this 

love.

There is a nest opposite my heart. With jagged edges it is a raft floating in a sea of weedy capillaries, it is a speck in a night sky of electric nerve-endings, it is a woven home lodged above branches of ribs. The nest holds seeds from which mystery will burst through hardened shell, hatch into a creature that will take its own breath, fall at its own pace, make its own flight. 

Through. 

Up. 

Out.

My fingertips wander over smooth skin and seek it out. I press into a tangle of fibers, a tangle of Other, a tangle of me. What is this nest saying? I listen closely, the waves of my fingerprints ebbing on bruises, a rivulet of red flooding Out the pathway in.

Something has been taken. Out. Something of me.

This exchange so clear in its procedure: guiding needle in, click click, flecks of flesh deposited into a tiny jar of sterile water, spindly cells like jellyfish arms trailing below. Little boats of pale pink and streaming red: questions floating beneath a label bearing my full name and birthdate thank you.

This came Out of me. How did it get In, this unclear, non-procedural Other of murky ancestry?

It doesn’t look diseased.

How would I know? A blackness, a rot, a searing stench? Or is it disguised in normalness? 

That is why I am here. 

That is why the questions are being asked. 

That is why I am feeling into my own ideas of what is life, what is death. 

The flapping numbed, my hand held, the chatter relentless. 

Do not distract me! I want to scream. 

I need to listen for the wings! I hold my breath to hear. 

They ask me if I am OK. They ask me if I am in pain. They tell me to have fun on vacation and to have a good day. They cannot feel the birds, they do not know about the nest. All they see is an image on a screen with irregular edges, a nodule to poke and test and monitor. To press into stagnation, to cover with plastic, to wrap up and be done. 

To numb some more.

I do not want to live a numb, bandaged life.

The wings arch against my ribcage, against the elastic holding my Outsides In. Feathers burst through fabric and the fluttering doesn’t stop. Will not stop. My heart dances to the drum of this motion, this outward movement. 

I close my eyes to feel the pain and expansion. 

I can feel the bursting of the past, of hope, of now.

I can feel.

It all.

My wings are free.

Dis/Integration

The breath long gone, the bones hidden. Deep green ferns under dusty pines, the road muddy and close. I check for feathers and beak, breakage and decay. 
There is nothing. 

Did the ants cart away red and black morsel by morsel? Did the coyotes drag apart the small bits of flesh and hollow wing? This body that I took from the side of the pavement, crushed between bright yellow dandelion-matted hill and jagged fence, this body I carried in cradled palms after the brief thought of premature dismemberment, this body I lay down on the damp forest floor, is gone. Disseminated into the world, disconnected from its form to form bits of other beings and places. 

Dis-integrated. Integrated into nothing. Integrated into everything else.

Each night I let go of dreams of the day, letting the real work of the night take their place, the truthful side of my eyes alight with color and motion. I stand at the periphery of whom I once was, marveling at the pieces floating and bumping together, swinging in wide arcs, ricocheting apart. I lift my arms to gather these fragments but they dissolve and disappear through fingers aching to cradle what they cannot hold. The parts become so small and rearrange themselves in such a way that I cannot see them with my eyes, I can only swim through the bright white of memory and possibility. 

Re-formed, re-integrated moment by moment, in this space and now. The puzzle pieces re-modeled, molded into the present. My wings re-membered in the flash of old man’s smile. The flesh of my yesterday’s being re-directing the subtle motion of a stream. My liminal thoughts re-appearing as an elephant on the page of a child’s notebook. 
 
I stop searching through the ferns for a glimpse of feather and beak. I empty my hands of yellow flowers, I breathe in the pine and moss. I step into the song of the birds, the dance of the clouds, the gliding stillness of my fingers against the air. Integrated into it all, the boundaries fall away and I walk further into this all encompassing self called world.