When noticing things that fly, vision strives upward, blackbirds shriek, common gray ones flutter on branches loaded with nutlets. But past the trees, up above, a huge bird of prey, not a vulture, some hawk, maybe an eagle, scans the city by air. Over the buildings, gliding with patience, unhurriedly, up where time is different, and mountains surpass man made roof tops, the highest towers they are capable of. A vision wants to take off bad, again and again, to see it all from the heights, because eyes have wings.
Things that fly say freedom is the answer to grief, grasping, a lightness much missed, unworried mentality of space, romance with those things that point to the sky, silence over the unrest and strife. Time gets trapped in the city structures, darkness settles in the limits of property, survival. We’ll have no more of that.
Better to have wings caressed, shaped by air velocity, no push, riding the invisible. A bird like heart, fast to pump on a given second, at the first glance of a mountainous chain, stretching beyond imagination.
Things that fly, our faith is coming of age.
A dragonfly in September’s clear blue, determined chopper of the currents, advisor to my ascension, proud, posed in primitive impulse, sat on the clothesline of your huge yard. The lawn was already dry, the wind content, slightly warm, and by bare feet connected to the pricks of toasted grass. He landed and balanced as a seasoned acrobat, stoic and powerful, his eyes domes of fractals. He saw, all the pieces, my fragments connected to this moment. I circled him carefully, while the morning sun healed my chilled bones. The broken fence you haven’t been up to repairing cracked a bit more, and the tool shack I noticed, is sealed shut from oxide.
Memories live in the museum of your back yard, and here today, a dragon acknowledges that your long process and my disconsolate joints wish to heal, swish over it all, as he would. Why, your garden is a sunbath today, where our main star tells of fires still alive in us both, while the dragonfly stares. Maybe he bathes too, his wings fizz, he energizes in stillness, wings ready.
I came to your house last September , when the first of the dragon flies saw me decide for good. I walked across the line, under the newborn autumn, considering flight my full truth.
Moths stuck to my car, as soon as the weather mellowed to humidity. Neptune had just receded back to its house, and cuddled up to good old Saturn. The pale months came with moths, just out of chrysalids and what happens inside. Baby bodies gone, retreated and dissolved, reconfigured to fly. Their new wings mimicked my grandma’s curtains, somehow they’re new but still old. They sought refuge in the cavern of my SUV, in the early work morning, when light has the cadmium filter of the end of year. A minute one settled beside me, under the rearview control. Seers, I heard, say moths are the bearers of transformation, and these day the stick to me, as I change lanes.
In the afternoon another landed on my window sill and stayed; at night they upholstered the panes to the back of our house, drawn to a sliver of inside light, the beginning of it, the timeline I can see already from this side, that I might jump into.
Moths like dry leaves, twins in the elemental kingdom, flighty daughters of autumn winds, November’s promise of tomorrow’s stable glow.