Vane

Vane

                --the flat part of either side of the shaft of a feather

Our shoulders ache.  The abyss

gapes at us.

When shall we

dare to fly?

                                Standoff

                                Denise Levertov

Maybe it’s the quite we’re afraid of

the most, as if it itself

were the spaces between feathers,

when they come undone and are spread

apart from the rachis to the vane

and each split barb and now the only thing

it will ever do is continue

dying the kind of dying feathers do

when they are of no use

to anyone anymore.  I have a coffin

full of them and two or more maybe a breast

but mostly wing feathers and one an eagle’s wing

and from another eagle I think maybe

a contour
but mostly its crows and the black

repose they make just

by being black and I think maybe

if I have to continue

going into all the quiet they are laying

out for me I want to go

dressed as a crow so that when I fall

into that black of it all I will feel

at home in it, as if it were mine and had been

all along and falling only means

rising up again and taking my beak

to my breast, my arms, to sift through

each feather and make them

straight enough to take the wind, today

a furious breath by the way, as if my mother

were alive again and angry and raising

up her hand and saying I’m going

to knock you so hard you’ll feel it coming for

a month of Sundays and maybe

it’s just the wind or maybe it’s my dying

uncle who steps close to the edge

of his life not knowing what's next, looking back

looking down and feeling the prick

in his wrist that is really the IV keeping him

asleep but sometimes I imagine it

feels like a feather coming through

like a tooth, breaking the skin, laying

flat along the wrist, quiet as eiderdown

around the cooling, and the next one tucked up against

the swirl, the toss, the leap, and the calm again

of the quite never so quiet sky.