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.