somniloquy.org: dove

dove

You're sixteen. It's one in the morning, and you've been sitting in this Denny's for two hours. You'll sit here until six, when your friend the shy junkie waitress gets off work. You have a notebook and a pen that keeps dying, and you wish you had books, a magazine, anything to read. You have a head full of poems.

Pour coffee. Light a cigarette. Play with the creamer packages, shaped like little buckets. You place your finger on top of one and press down, and it flips over. Press, flip. Press, flip. Your pen is dying. Light another cigarette.

You look terrible. You walked an hour in the rain. You think you might have a cracked rib.

There's an older man in the non-smoking section, balding, glasses. He reminds you of your father. He's with a woman you think you may have dreamed of once, a woman with hair the color of Florida oranges. She has a tattoo on her neck. She looks too comfortable and too young to be doing what she's doing.

You want to call your father and say, fuck you. You want to get high later and you know you will, but you'll never make the phone call. You'll never pick up the phone and say, fuck off, die, rot, crawl away, leave me be, burn. You love your father.

You love the man who looks like your father, and the woman who looks like your dreams, and your friend the shy junkie waitress, and even your wounded side.

And you pray. You say, our father, tonight I crept into the ribs of a shattered building, and in a nest of cable and wire I found a dove. She was hopelessly tangled, frantic, her wings convulsing. I thought of this awful world, this horrible country and my friends the beaten and strangled poor, and I crouched by the bird. I unwound the wire, gently, gently. I took the frightened bird in my hand. Our father, sometime-savior, maker of difficult situations, I was wounded and holding a wounded bird. I knew what I was doing. I held her in my hands as gently as if she were my own. I knew. I crept away, and I let the dove go.