John GuzlowskiMy father dreams of pigeons,
their souls, their thin cradles of bone, but it is their luck he admires most. A boy in Poland in a dawn all orange and pinks, his hands opened like a saint’s and taught those birds to fly, to rise on the air, their wings beating the rooftops into flesh, into dreams of angels above the crystal trees. And later in the gray dawn clouds blowing about him in the camps, where not even pigeons were safe, where his body, thin then, like a shoelace, sought other dreams other bodies, and found only the comfort of worms—even then he could still remember the birds without chains, breathing quickly and cooing “We are going, we are going.” |