It's not always instant, sometimes the wings begin as a flash of pain between shoulder blades, then grow ever so slowly, silky feathers, hollow bone. At first they're no use, the courage to leap off high cliffs is lacking, or the feathers aren't really plumes, just illusory flecks of butterfly dust whispering: "Patience, mere mortal, you must wait until the iridescence is dry..."

So we perch, wet wings pulsing, but by then the next angry myth comes along, batlike and menacing, hot jealousy melting our newborn flight feathers into fins, stone, wood, clattering hooves...

We never know what to expect. Fear of water, terror of clifftops, reluctance to cut down an old tree, so desperately clinging to its fragment of soil, so likely to be a trapped nymph in disguise...

Prescient Ovid must have known, he must have understood the perpetual human longing for wings, gills, probing roots. Surely it's nothing more than hubris, sweet memory of home...  

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Margarita Engle is a botanist and the Cuban-American author of several novels, most recently The Poet-Slave (forthcoming from Henry Holt). Short works appear in such journals as Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Caribbean Review, and Hawai'i Pacific Review. Awards include a Cintas Fellowship, a San Diego Book Award, and most recently, a 2005 Willow Review Poetry Award. Margarita lives in central California, where she enjoys hiking and helping her husband with his volunteer work for a wilderness search-and-rescue dog-training program.
 

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