The Breath of a Wing
By Bruce Spang
The zebra finch flutters by my face—
the air tactile, featherlike.
In the emptiness of day, I sit
in a brown leather La-Z-Boy.
A dove coos, I’m here, I’m here.
Who was it who said the world
was with God? Or was it the Word
is God? I’m not sure.
But Blake did say words have
their own divinity. They reach
yet fail to reach yet reach to
where I am here with my lover.
The purple lilacs leave
their scent like wings.
This day is like all the others,
as we, too, are like all others.
Our four dogs sleep on the carpet.
It’s midday. Much of light
has spent its soft dominion
over the wall. The caged finches
sing one to another, Watch me.
They flit from perch to perch.
Dazzling, persistent in flight,
they aren’t hurried, yet flick
off the lights at night, they settle
as the pulse under the skin
where no words exist. Indwelling
Heidegger called it, the way words
dwell in the here, the perch, the nest,
the window, the raucous sky. My lover once
touched my cheek like the breath of a wing
and whispered, I love you so near me
the words flamed like a tongue
in my mouth as if my heart
and the finch were one, caged
yet content in our durable love
Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, is the author of two novels, The Deception of the Thrush and Those Close Beside Me. His most recent collection of poems, All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, was just published. He’s also published four other books of poems, including To the Promised Land Grocery and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press) along with several anthologies and several chapbooks. He is the poetry and fiction editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. His poems have been published in Connecticut River Review, Puckerbrush Review, Red Rover Magazine, Great Smokies Review, Kalopsia Literary Journal, Café Review and other journals across the United States. He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina in Asheville and lives in Candler, NC with his husband Myles Rightmire and their five dogs, five fish, and thirty birds.