The Dove
The day dies and comes back as fog.
A dove stands on my fencepost. Motionless,
as if wounded. Too close to be safe. Not that I’d hurt her,
but I’ve read humans are the most dangerous animals.
Scripture says a dove comes to bring solace,
though I don’t know what I’m grieving,
just that I’m glad the sun lies down
on the white canal like a strip of brilliance,
and around it, even the mountains disappear into softness,
as if to prove the world isn’t only a hard place.
The dove is a creamy grey color I like to call dun,
though I don’t think I’m using the word exactly right.
Dun, I’d name the dove if she was my pet,
though she’s supposed to be wild in the marsh
along with the coyotes howling every night.
And there, snagged on the half-dead lawn, a few downy feathers.
I always try to find the proper thing to feel.
But this morning I’m confused—
should I be glad that the dove has chosen me,
or sad that a coyote might’ve tried to do her in?
Then the dove stretches her wings
which make up almost half of her body.
Doves are one of the strongest fliers among birds.
With grey wings that end in a dark brown color
as if the world had dirtied her. Like me,
just waiting for bad news I don’t know about yet.
Though I want to believe the dove will help me get over it,
even if I feel her watching me, the way my father did,
always with something caustic in his mouth.
Something he hated about me—my unshaven legs
or the way I held my fork, or how,
behind my thick glasses, my eyes looked ugly-small.
Maybe the dove came to remind me that between joy and sorrow,
we don’t ever have to choose.
Like my father dying after a real apology.
Which was more than enough, having been born into mud myself
with the sky still between my fingers.
Or the dove suddenly in flight. A loud flapping, a quick ascent.
Then, gone,
and it’s sheer exaltation I feel.
Look at my father in his wheelchair,
eyes shining with tears,
whispering, I’m sorry I was so cruel,
and me shouting, Yes! to love
dirtied with hurt and time,
between two of the most dangerous animals on earth.
O
is all I’ve managed of this morning
riding the Kingston ferry back and forth
in a punishing rain. And thinking O,
my friend, you asked about my self-hate
when all I’ve got is a story
inside a shackling pen, the sheep walking
their lambs unaware into the O
of a well-oiled, circular saw, some god
having ordained new souls
lie down in the ripe green graves of spring.
Meanwhile, here winds bowl
the clouds into gutters. Sun sparks the sea.
The ferry slows near shore,
massive engines back-thrusting. Listen,
I never asked to be born.
Never knew my heart would become
a dark barn the sheep return to
without their lambs, the dogs nipping
the bleating young out the back
door of time. Can you see that
what you swallow makes you flesh?
Even if it’s the O of a rope looped
around your hunger, the O
of a toothless mouth opening,
closing over the fat zero
that my mother fed me, repeating
before I could talk,
No one will ever love you. Sorry,
I meant to say this differently.
More gently. To mention the O
of revelation, the giddy O
of awe. To say that it’s been a toss-up
between loving this world
of meadows, frogs under stars,
and trying to leave. Or maybe
it wasn’t clear until you asked,
that as long as I’m alive,
I can be both dog and blade, sheep
and lamb, unloved but held
by the cherry trees in blossom,
even the ferry turning
like a mind one way, then back again.
Julia B. Levine’s poetry has won many awards, including a 2021 Nautilus Award for her fifth poetry collection, Ordinary Psalms, (LSU press, 2021), as well as the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU Press, 2014). Recently she has won a 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2023 Oran Perry Burke Award from The Southern Review, the 2022 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, the 2020 Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Award, and a 2022 American Academy of Poetry Poet Laureate Fellowship for her work in building resiliency in teenagers related to climate change through poetry, science, and technology. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, and Prairie Schooner. She received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA in poetry from Pacific University.
Read three poems by Julia B. Levine also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Alexa, courtesy Pixabay.
