On Leaving the Nest

Sometimes it catches you off-guard,
on an updraft when your wings are tired,
you remember the feeling of a whole tree to explore.
Hopping from one place to the next felt
like freedom enough.

And it was enough. I was a chestnut
robin with a scarlet front, I was a
red-winged blackbird, they are always
magic. I was a dragon, hot and full of
scales. I was something
else, leaving behind the old skin, the old
memory self.

Weeping and fighting
through the night will express
demons. You can find the
clensing in the cold new light
of dawn, seen with eyes tired and
relieved, in the sudden chirping
surreally floating through the window screen.

There was a hawk we used to see,
circling above the towers and the
wind-snapped flags and the tall
yellow-leaved branches. We did not
know, we did not know, or we pretended
not to know, that we someday would have to be the
hawks, circling solitary on strong broad wings, in the
endless pale blue, looking back down on the towers
and the spirit-laden flags and the tall pencil-thin
branches. Hunting now, for our own meat
with our own claws, and never mind the
stench, the stench was ours.

It is a fearful thing
to hold yourself cheaply,
sitting in a room full of truth, and
yet when she tells me this is what I've done,
I believe her for the fierceness in her tears.
All my perceptions are upside-down, and I do
not know, I do not know, I pretend not to
know, this is because I am now
flying. All the secrets that I tell
or keep cannot change the simple fact
of strong, sore, new, uncertain wings.

I thought the grief was over but perhaps
I am now strong enough to live with it
beside me. What sparrow does not want to
cast itself into the sky, and see that it has always been
an eagle? This one, this one, only you and I
and everyone that breathes. Oh God, how is it
you have made me a pheonix, when all the other girls
are peacocks, pigeons, and nightengales? I want to
be like and with and one of. I want to stay curled
in a little home of sticks and hair and books and
passageways. I want to stop but I am already
in the sky, and I have eaten meat that I
have hunted, from lives which I have gracefully
taken, as I was meant and built
to do.

Thing is, I went to Bryn Mawr
and it hurt me. And it was not
my home. Not
now.