The Anger of Doves

Perched on his chair,
seated on the edge of wisdom,
his stillness is a flight.
The rest of us laugh about lemon tarts,
their squishy softness like falling
into a woman with open mouth,
eyes shut. I don’t get it, he says.

I want to yell at him.
I want to tell him, for god’s sake, at least
name the dust motes at which you stare:
Ferdinand and Flower, Fred and Wilma,
Bibbitty Bobbitty Boo.

He baits us with breathing.
Tenting his fingers,
he pecks at facts
while we swallow whole
worms spilling up
from childhood and trace
the iridescent trails of slugs
by light of a quarter moon.
And he (politely) tells us:
I do not understand.

There is something in this nothingness
that bulges from the socket of a long-ago blinding,
that beats with an inverse heart.
Can everybody hear it?

Or is it just I
who once at an AA meeting
sat shotgun in a metal chair,
balancing a tin-foil tray on my knee
for the ashes of my story.
An old man leaned close
slipping words and cigarette smoke
into my ear: Beware the anger of a dove.

I went to refill coffee, slumped
into another chair, another row,
and gnawed the side of my thumb
until it bled. Why did my flesh plume
so suddenly red? He must have been
a loon, no doubt, who maybe planned
to gull me into bed, an old man’s
absolution, but why the burning of my face?
It must have been the graze of his beard
or the kind of shame
I never understand.

-Kitty Yanson