GATES BY KIKA DORSEY

There are so many gates:
thatched brown gates that open to rice fields,
white wooden gates to keep in the dogs,
wrought-iron black gates to castles,
gates that open like mouths
gates that slam shut and lock,
gate of heaven to shut me out.

The gate that was mine
was on a white picket fence
that the palm reader had teased me about
before it came into my life,
said how I wanted it but would feel trapped—
babies, a house, all that struggle—
said I was crazy,
he could see it in the etched lines of my hands,
fist revealing my two children.

And we had the fence and the gate
three years later,
husband a painter as white as the fence,
I always pregnant and nursing with white milk
of a mother’s lonely giving,
closing the gate to keep the gray dog in,
to keep the children safe.
You see, being a mother shuts you in.
Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

Now our gates are high,
two of them on a gray fence
weathered like my hands
from the cold, Colorado winters.
Every face I know is a gate,
and the sad sky nods no to me
with its white clouds when I try to open it.

And maybe I am crazy,
because I just want to be swallowed
by another space, want to climb
into the mouth of a land and sleep
with a golden key in my pocket,
as blackbirds land on me and sing.