wings

There is only air and effort, the shape of keen wings carving ladders from the wind. The days struggle by, full of broken oaths and the early-bird robins. Crows on the streetlamp, sparrows feeding in the green beside the meridian. Cranes and egrets on the wing in the gray tailed dawn. Woodpeckers heckling squirrels just past the window. The vultures rise above it all, riding some updraft, roping in the sun.

I am witness only that I am watching. I see wings spread and fold, see the flocks disperse and assemble, deeper than any mystery hidden in some holy text. Higher than the hand of heaven. The earth encumbers my every thought and mood, its machinery so thoroughly woven through my bones. It is my bounds and I am its burden, all heavy limbs and weary eyes. All salt and gristle and letters never read.

It seems simplicity's own soul, these swoops and ascensions. It seems a wonder and a theft. They escape our conception and enter our dreams, those brittle wings unwound. Feathers bright or dull as fallow fields and cracked asphalt, there is a magic outside intention that we hunger and clamber towards. Flight not as a power but as a fact. The flocks and swarms slicing through the bright blue and the sober gray. The exposed clockwork never a clue as to the workings of the world.