Tag: flight

Departures (Unconfirmed)

arrivals not recorded

to fly was all he wanted––to sail the boat unfurl the wings, kissing wind; fast and faster across the land of the sometimes sure, sure enough

to fly again, he demanded––to where was insignificant––to hurl headfirst toward some invisible purpose, hard and harder across the land of the dream

i listened, how some record the songs of birds at the brink before they go, taking notes, noting what it took to know how he would stay flying fast and lost in the land of the dream from which i decided to go

quickly but soft, & likely unnoticed until one day when he wakes with a sense that something

happened, how it seemed real like a song

so real (he could almost hear it now!) or (maybe then!) or at the time of some other when, when he one day once upon a time got around to listening to what was somewhere (wasn’t it?) close enough he could almost sing it, there from the tip of his tongue

and later means to name what is leaving, to trace somehow its contours, but what is gone is good and gone and has no edge but what returns to the initial wish––

fly

where we stood, watching

on those who mistook their heights for flight

Consider this, we tried—but held still when they raged. We were about to say babies, offer skillets, call on memory. We learned to hold our words, to stand instead, ever ready with arms at our sides, palms open. We held them through their nightmares and when they raged that we knew nothing of their wars.

They did not come toward us. Their bodies knew a direction, some center pointing, but they had trained themselves away from it.

We waited for a decision that did not arrive. No more war at the threshold, or bringing it home, or calling its conquest flight. We held our tongues, tasting blood and what. We could not say. Stay, we pressed, a whisper. It was not a command, but a reminder of contact with the living. Here, we said, and offered skin. A reminder of how tender the flesh that holds us here, how barely.

Their systems grew intricate. Machineries of belief meant to lift them, and we grew tired of these heights, sensing the fall pre-written.

Milk leaked. Children cried to them—look, see me—but the angle was wrong. Too low. Sometimes they would lift a child as if testing the weight. We held our breath.

Our bodies became passage—grease for the next idea, pillows where their heads had been. We learned to move on. 

The next thing was the children. They wanted to fly, too, but we did not throw them. Not with one on each hip, a basket of laundry, onions cut open on the board.

Here is where they stepped in, who were here so briefly. To do the throwing. Up! They lifted. Up, up! they shouted. 

The children screamed. Again!

phalanx

in flight

Hello, i
am still here
flying through sky
into riverbed, into body in river
in bed into ocean ––either way
disinclined to make points, only pointing,
ever to erosion and becoming and I tend
to erode the best intentions of anyone who tries
to name me as a fixed point & sometimes when
i take this skin shirt out for air i am reminded
to dress in layers after going into places
where so many are so eager to use
their ready points as points
of contact when these
only make me bleed
& then I am back
to being current––
again

count them

with bird

What after that wind flies? There goes one harpy. Now another. Repeat. They fall back later, to resume the docile pose of downy chicks in hand, two at a time.

After, one wonders. What this means if you consider the ratio of handheld bird to idea of those remaining in the bush? Look around then, sense a feather of presence. But now is one of those times when counting will not hold so maybe later but who knows. Was now always so hard to number–– or ever?

o bird
o feather
o breath
o time

hold me like the one about to fly
like found feather after bird gone
like opening notes of song almost
remembered.

point being

in the after

The point, if there is one, is to emerge. Or else, to acknowledge the emergence of something. It is possible these acts are synonymous, or that one lives inside the other. Does it matter which holds which? Likely not. Whichever it is, it won’t be fitting into that familiar template of the hero myth––having tried this one, and found it lacking, possibly deadly.

big top

spectacle, witness, aftermath

The circus men came and went and we listened. As women, we had been raised to believe that some sanctity was possible in the sacrament of attention––that attention, once received, could be enough to transform its object.

They thought we were applauding the show. We were only waiting for them to drop it. The babies were coming with open mouths.

My grandmother taught by example, how even if it hadn’t quite happened in our lifetimes––yet––it might be possible to pull them from themselves by sheer force of love. They had spectacles to offer and we watched. The point, she taught me, was not to feed their illusions but to draw them away from what deluded them, like pulling the host away from the poison to salvage what you can when it becomes clear that the poison has become the central mass. The power of the constant gaze could do this, she believed.

My grandfather was full of wind and she loved into him; it was wartime and every would-be flying man was still charging toward the sun. The war disappointed, but not the rewards that came after if you managed to come out alive; annual parades guaranteed a lifetime supply of empty praise and then with a home of his own and her inside to keep it, he sold used cars, telling stories again and again. She held on and listened, placing his vitamins in a plastic case, ordered by days of the week. 

She listened until she died of a rot too long ignored. She had held it in her gut for years, in silence as we do when we know this is no ways good but knew first to keep looking in love. Not for something coming, but as an orientation. Hope is a posture. Hers never slouched. 

Dammit Bob, she used to say, and I thought the rest of the sentence had something to do with how she wanted him to live already and cut the crap. His best, when he managed to pull it together, was still so much less than she saw in him. He walked around with his toolbox measuring to no end and schooling any woman within earshot on the importance of the level. A child on each hip, she waited until he left to patch the holes in the walls and mend whatever needed repair after he was through fixing, and she nursed the babies and until she died, repeated, don’t get caught up in ideas, they take you nowhere in the end. She was on morphine in the end. 

They said she went peacefully, for living had taught her nothing if not to die well and full of grace. He didn’t last long after his Grace was gone, with no one left to wait for him to come around to living. Then he gave up the ghost of his self-importance and he followed after. What remains are the shadows of a collection of statues, looming. He never grew into them. They are still here.

Ancestral Flight

And skeletal remains

Considering the stars that are absent in daytime
it is not so strange to find unknown bodies who
unbidden but abiding, come––and the question
of avian flight, its beginnings: from tree-limbs
down or from ground up? The climbers between
branches or the crawlers into them when the front
pair of four limbs become propellers, then wings.
One of the dancers compared her stirring limbs
to the scream against the skeleton that might
become in confinement a gnarled tree. Only
the bird displays a wishbone, that peaking bow
to scissor stratospheric weave and from her history
this question about what is possible before
there are harbors for safe landing of a body

with a head full of sky

Flight Paths

Against light pollution.

These eyes trained on sky still guide wild flights by stars, set courses for migration at midnight––

But what can they find in the glow bleeding from the empire’s cities?

Still singing hallelujahs of nobody knows, forever-present notes that know what no hand grants, no thief can steal.

Reaching back to the original promise in the first split of atom from an original rib to give birth to the genesis of song––

In the space of a womb, a surrogate tomb for the still unburied,
long dead still––

singing unnamed solids behind these gates
the liquid river sings us––

still
singing
our home.