Today's poem is by David Dodd Lee

The Wind Tunnel
       

Where had she hidden the feathers? Where
were her wings? I'd been several years
on the same boat, often less than

a mile from shore, the fishing lines
snapping, the mist like a not quite raging
winter storm, the apple blossoms

falling, frozen. The boat's path
was like the closing of a circle. It went nowhere—
it was time and space narrowing

into a funnel so that at every point
along the way you were not far from where you
thought you wanted to be. The flowers

could have been her wings. My mother
barely even had shoulders. She had
a voice like a doll's, a thirty thousand two-

hundred ninety-one-day-old doll abandoned
in a car left for scrap metal. I glimpsed
such a doll; then a March crocus

standing up pale in snow. I held onto
an alternator like it might be another heart.
Dolls have dirty skirts and my mother's feet

touched the cold floor. She was enfeebled
with tarnish. Once queen of the what-if
flashback, time-traveling for hours to 1940s

St. Louis soda shops, Catholic in a plaid skirt. . .
Now blossoms blow around like shredded
petticoats, the ashes of Pall Mall's, some-

thing on the other side of sleep and having
bad dreams. We couldn't hold onto the rope
any longer and its frayed end came loose

from the world like never needing to answer
for anything again. The ocean smells like
a lack of shame; it smells like the naked

body, acceptance that is so totally complete it's
like it's the harbor or cove that birthed you; you'll
never leave. Her wings might just be the

finishing off of flowers. She's up there some-
where beyond the airplanes now, escaped through
the crack in the door. Wind blowing out of an empty mirror.

Copyright © 2025 David Dodd Lee All rights reserved
from The Shore
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission