A Dream of Doors

A Dream of Doors

I’d like to take a tour of doors: scrolling wrought iron
in Paris, heavy brass in Italy, carved oak in the Carolinas.

I’d like to touch doorknobs: green medallions,
brass faded like good jeans. Coolness and click
of a lock sliding open, fingers wrap handle,

thumb depresses a metal tongue and presto! Open.
I’d like to feel myself on one side of things and then
 
the other. I’d like to hear the pentatonic scale
played back to me as I knock on a hundred doors.
I’d like to hear the wind pull a door shut,

ease a door open. I could unscrew hinges
and remove a door completely, feel the open mouth

of a house gape at my indiscretion. I’d like to stand
in the frame, waving goodbye as he rides his bike away,
a tiny bell wave back. I would do gravestone etchings

of dates, manufacturers, names engraved, birds flying
from nowhere to somewhere, and I’d paper my door

with the impressions of doors from Tippecanoe county
or string them across my porch like prayer flags.
I’d like to see my dog nosing the door open

to jump her face closer once more. Give me
a garland of red doors strung across a blue sky,

let birds fly through and paper planes; may a kite catch
and hang in the frame. Let the door swing wide and pour
a tumbler of milk onto a willow tree, its arms of hair

 
heavy with nourishment, my hand outstretched
to catch whatever may fall. 

 ~ Published in Apercus Quarterly