Doves Drying
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I didn’t know doves could look like machine parts. They were out there early, after rain, on the crushed red rocks in the fire pit, elevating one wing, then the other, at angles suggesting breakage––sheered flywheel blades, bent feather rotors, hidden breasts two disks of dawn, a pair of them, like always, together wet, together drying.
At first, I thought the strong wind overnight had blown in metal scraps from the street work down the block. Then I saw injured birds and thought how will I finish them off? But they were whole, methodically exposing their flight gear to the new air, tendons warming luxuriously.
Doves, anvils of melancholy, there is hope when such invisible weight can fly. [End Page 107]
ANNE PIERSON WIESE’s poetry collection, Floating City (Louisiana State University Press) received the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. She has been the recipient of poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the South Dakota Arts Council, and a Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize.
