The Plumage of Joy

Wounds rarely arrive looking like wounds

They arrive wearing the plumage of joy

Bright-throated

Beautiful

Perched innocently upon the branch as though they have always belonged there

They sing

And because the song is lovely

The bird draws nearer

Because the song is lovely

The bird forgets caution

Because the song is lovely

The bird opens its wings

Who fears a beautiful bird?

Who closes the gate against a creature singing?

Who suspects that something so luminous might one day be found nesting among the ribs?

By the time I understood

It had already learned my name

It took me days to draw the bird

At first its face was wrong

The beak distorted

The proportions impossible

I erased and erased until the paper began carrying its own ghosts

Something kept resisting recognition

Now I know what it was

I was drawing the wound

Not the wound itself

But the creature carrying it

The tears came long before the drawing was finished

They arrived quietly then settled over everything

Every memory darkened beneath them

Every kindness grew wings

Every ordinary afternoon became a migration

Even the smallest moments changed shape

A glance became an omen

A silence became a continent

The tears landed everywhere

And afterward nothing remained innocent

That is what grief does

It stains

It places its thumbprint upon every remembered thing until the past begins glowing from within

And I am tired

Not from loving

From carrying an entire sky

From waking each morning with the feeling that something inside me has been left uncovered

I am the bird

Not because I am fragile

Because birds protect the breastbone

The soft place

The living place

The place closest to the heart

Yet somehow I lifted my wings and showed it anyway

And now the ribs remain open

The rain enters

The moon enters

The silence enters

Everything enters

I am not the same woman

I can feel her leaving

The woman who mistook safety for permanence

The woman who believed the sky lived above her instead of inside her

I watch her recede

The way a shoreline recedes from a departing ship

Beautiful

Familiar

Unreachable

And here I remain

Simply unable to return to the creature I was before the tears taught every memory how to bleed light