Lock and Key

In my dream I open my mouth wide and reach the key inside. I find the metal lock and nestle the key into the crooked gate. Turn and click. Something is happening. I can pull it out now. I have passed the test even though I don't know what is being tested. 

But as I pull the lock becomes bigger, lodges in my throat, fills the cavern of my mouth and presses my tongue deep into my jaw. My teeth ache. I am unable to breathe. With the lock in place none of this was happening. Can I put the lock back deep within, click it closed, breathe around the obstruction? I mean, at least I’m breathing, right? 

But no, now that I know its there I can’t go on living with this barrier to my full breath (breadth), my voice. I cannot swallow the imposition away. And so I pull. The lock tears at my cheeks and my lungs ache without air to nourish them, me. 

I pull.

I wake. The heaviness in my chest is still there. I gasp for breath and savor the coolness of the morning air running down my throat.  

I make a cup of tea, meditate (breath in, breath out) go to my desk, flip open my laptop.

Click and release, the screen flashes to life. The keyboard unlocks under my fingers and my voice pours out, pushes that dream lock out, over, gone.

Almost. 

It waits in the wings (under my desk, under my bed) for another morning when I say I am too busy to write (busy with what?), an evening when I claim I am too tired to use my voice (knowing the fatigue will let more truth pour forth), too wrapped up in taxes or paperwork or scheduling more Busy-ness to feel some sort of purpose. 

Without even knowing it I place the lock back into my head with each excuse. I am my own jailer, my keeper, but in my hand I hold the master key. With consciousness, one day, I will be awake enough to raise this hand holding my self-fashioned prison and throw both lock and key into the river. I will simply let the words flow and rust that metal into the riverbed, back into the earth, shards of metal and words flowing to the sea. 

Why

 not

 today.

Mourning

Feathers at the window.  A heart shaped mark where she hit. 

We untangle limbs and mouths, slip cloth over tangled heads of hair. 
We open the screened door and step out onto hot concrete, the astringent smell of the desert invading our lungs: sharp intake, sigh. 

An angel, wings hunched and shaking, lay gasping on the ground. 
Her deep black eyes wide with panic, 
wide with what the fuck just happened, 
wide with a glimpse of the shadow descending. 

We bend over the broken body, lay hands on the bird’s beating chest, breathe with her ragged breaths. A single drop of blood on her beak, head twisted impossibly behind her supine bluegreyness, legs kicking into which she once flew. 

The window is an inverted photograph of this afternoon: the robin blue sky, billowing clouds of the West, pinyons and junipers climbing past the frame of upper sill. 

She was flying into a dream and smashed into this reality. 

Chest heaving (hers, ours) her strangling tongue flicks into dry air once more before stillness descends.

Mourning a mourning dove, my melancholy cry of childhood summertime, I cradle her in my hands, I lift her into a tree to keep the dog away. 
We say words, we hold hands, we cry at what is lost 
and what is meant by this 
and for what is to come (for her, us).

Today the ants have moved in, her body a feast for tiny legs and grasping jaws. 

We soar, we break, we die, we nourish* 

*Not necessarily in that order.