I was walking back from the dining hall or health center
or a class (I don’t remember) toward a tunnel-like passage
on campus that echoes even a whisper,
and toward the blueish purple flowers and twisting vines
wrapped around wooden structures just tall enough
for the overhanging greenery to caress the top of my hair
as I strolled beneath them, branches holding onto a strand
or two of my curls as I laughed and reached up to release them,
permission
from Mother Nature to just be
in that moment,
when a rather large grey pigeon fell headfirst
off the hall roof,
smack
in front of me on the sidewalk, its neck snapping
immediately under the weight
of its rotund body,
its eyes, blank and dark, staring at my
body frozen mid-step, my gaze locked on its neck,
now perpendicular to its tail feathers
and pointing to the sky
as if to say,
“that’s where I should have been,”
my ears reliving the
crunch, crunch, crunch,
wondering what brought it down
to earth – brought me here to this moment,
fastened onto the pigeon’s sudden deliverance,
stuck,
yards away from my own salvation.