When noticing things that fly, vision strives upward, blackbirds shriek, common gray ones flutter on branches, loaded with nutlets. Beyond the trees, up above, a huge bird of prey, some hawk or eagle, scans the city by air. He passes over the buildings, gliding with patience, unhurriedly, up where time is different, and mountains mock man made towers. 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. It is lightness much missed, unworried mentality of space, romance with those things that point to the sky, isolation from unrest and strife. Time ages in the city structures, darkness settles in the limits of property, survival mode seeps under front doors. We’ll have no more of that.
Better to have wings caressed, shaped by air velocity, 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, primitive and poised, 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. She landed and balanced as a seasoned acrobat, stoic and powerful, her eyes domes of fractals. She saw all the pieces, my fragments connected to this moment. I walked around her carefully, while the morning sun healed my chilled bones. The broken fence you haven’t been able to repair 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, the dragonfly acknowledges that your long process and my disconsolate joints wish to heal, to swish over it all, as she would. Why, your garden is a sunroom, where our day star tells of fires still alive in us both. Meanwhile she stares and bathes too. Her wings fizz, she energizes in stillness, charging her body with sacred rays.
I came to your house last September , when the first of the dragon flies saw me decide for good. I walked across, under the clothesline, in the newborn autumn, considering flight my next 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 season came with moths, fresh out of chrysalids and all that happened inside. Baby bodies gone, retreated and dissolved, reconfigured to fly. Their new wings reminded me of 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 say moths are the bearers of transformation, and these day they 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. It’s the beginning of it, the timeline I can see already from this side of the livingroom.
Moths like dry leaves, analogies of the elemental kingdom, flighty daughters of autumn, November’s promise of tomorrow’s stable glow.