an odd dreaming of birds and snakes

I’ve started dreaming about birds. They are always
different in my dreams than they are in life— larger, stranger.
One night it was a scarlet avocet,
black as night, with crimson Chinese characters
inked upon its back. One night it was hawfinches,
larger than hawks, their beaks thick as rods of steel
and their heads dimpled like the top of an apple.
Sometimes they are indistinguishable but large as elephants,
in pine forests that tower against the sky.

Maybe these landscapes are so large because
my life feels small just now, constrained,
my life lived within offices and in chairs in front
of monitors, with only my mind active, and yet
even that chained to the form of academic writing.
Natalie Goldberg once urged writers to think of
structure as a necessary skeleton, or like the skin
of a snake, that could be stuffed full with whatever
you liked, but had to be recognizable as a snake.
I haven’t done very well accepting that I need to
build a snake right now and have been wrestling
around with the form, frustrated. Perhaps it is a
useful metaphor to embrace. Perhaps I need to see
this week as making its spine, one weird vertebrae
at a time, laying them into their lovely interlocking
pattern. Maybe the birds are my desire to escape,
but it is a blessing to be on this journey towards
a PhD at all. Perhaps I had best be on my guard,
to guard this feeble little serpent of a project from
the fey eye of the eagle circling in the currents far
above.