Bird

The eye doesn’t flicker or waver. It holds you there. Except it doesn’t hold you, in any sense of the word, because it has no interest in you. It does not see you as you see yourself. You fancy yourself an imposter in your own life, the wearer of borrowed robes, a thief of time and space and attention, but it doesn’t care. You are only a liminal concern. You are light, some heat. The eye contracts. It is not like yours, or the eyes of others you say you know, feel you know, those you hold close and dear and true. Those eyes warm you, or else pose no threat. In those eyes you see belonging, bonhomie, home. But in these eyes, with their unbroken glimmering glare, you see wildness. It is chaos, tethered, in potentia, packed tight and dense. It doesn’t live the life you live. You live a cushioned, plump life; your days creak and grind past; you grey the air with your complaining. Soft. But it lives quickly, all flashes and points and edges. It cuts air from air like meat from a bone. Its days are limned with blood. It is the coming incarnadine.

And up. You see it where it belongs, slicing skyward. Hopkins knew, the mastery of the thing. Brute beauty and valour and act. It holds in its eye things you could never, will never, see. Beat, higher. Turning and turning.

Things fall apart.

You want speed, majesty, grace. You are offered torpor, uncertainty, hollowness. You hum terrestrial. You strain upwards, visoring your eyes with a hand. It flies in front of the sun and you look down.

The earth calls, reminding you.

Permalink