wing it

Leaves fall, building piles and patterns and grievances, dry soil taking up what the season’s short of. The flesh takes on the torpor of the slow roast of summer, the meat only falling short of departing the bone, stilling to stew in all available juices. Land ho, sore hooves, and gaffed limbs stuck in whatever spot of bother the last stepped in. The local fauna know, with squirrels draped over fence rails and cats disappearing below unkempt homes. Climate and geography wrap them all up handily, with only the birds on wing escaping the day’s cruel escapades. Fly away, fly away, red red robin and kettle black crow. The sky above a wide open road.

Canadian Geese fly low above as gray doves spy from the farther pine. A scrub jay drinks from the old galvanized washtub as sparrows pick at the feeders, opportunity always a cost. Clouds dim the smoke colored sky while the ocean of the atmosphere drifts past, the firmament gone soft with the unwinding of the wind. Thirty more geese more or less add to the gaggle in the field behind the fence, and the neighbors’ chickens cluck with the thrill of being fed. The feel of rain brushes up close and intimate though so far it’s mostly drought dry, then a few droplets stipple the skin, and faith is momentarily restored. 

There is a magic on the wing, a spell woven with beauty, envy, and resignation. Once stolen away in flight, most everything comes down to trying not to fall, avoiding the sort of clouts gravity advances in spades. Something stirs the crown of the pine above— a jay, a dove, a crow— a swift passage of half guesses sliding through the mind. A hummingbird blurs the bounds of the periphery, the soul so stentorian in its absence as experienced thick this trick of words, each sentence served in the echoes of some decoded labyrinth lingering in the original Greek. Here in the anticipation of the fled abstraction of these partial observations, until lift, until the inevitable departure. Like the custom of the nation of yes, and the counter clicks out the signal, filling in the blanks left for cognition. Birds fly over that rainbow, wing it (where available).