Dream Nest

More like a basket
            of twig and hair, 
            surprisingly 
            tall
           
            and deep—

                        in a tree
            outside my bedroom
            window.

I knew 
            something lived in there
            you wouldn’t assume
                        lived in a nest.

Then I knew:
            a human lived there.

And once I knew—
            the nest, nearly 
           
            disintegrated, 
                           still in the tree. 
                                   
It wasn’t about trauma, the perfect 
            and then the broken 

                        nest 
            in which a human 
                        lived—

            Born and lit and broken
                                     comes I.

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“Sometimes, as I fall asleep, I ask for an instructive dream; and sometimes my psyche provides. As the dream dissolved, I felt as if I was spun from thinnest glass. Waking up, the last stanzas came to me as the dream’s lesson.”
—Dana Levin