Blood, Glass, Pigeons in the Bathtub The pigeons flap in the eaves below the window —— Loud!  guttural warbles, overlapping, urgent, piercing, like sharp-tongued human squabbling. I pound the window glass with one palm, hoping to scare them into flying away.  But glass shatters, and my hand is through the glass to the wrist —— long silence from shatter, the three-story fall, til the plates hit the ground. Now glass in the tub, beneath the window.  Now blood. Now the ink-blue square of no-window.  Now the threat of the pigeons, coming right in, to strut in the tub. The flaps of their wings outside, now deathly, rise, as if to carry me off —— the sifting sound, dissolving the stuff of air, into —— where?  As if there were some crime here —— suspicion of blood and glass in the bathtub, with pigeons standing dumbly around. But truth:  the angry sounds of the birds made me angry, and I smashed the window —— then what of the girl in the hospital psych unit, who took the cardboard out, leaving a black square next to the air conditioner, and squeezed her body through —— three stories, she fell:  a black sea wrapped in a white sail. Copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Twiddy Poems Home