Between mundane and mythic, why can't it be both, woven together like feather and air are? |
Sometimes Its Just a Sky Looking back, the thousand-century stare fleeting through like Horus. or more like this feathered exclamation point fleeting through the right now; or just sometimes fleeting through: Because sometimes it's just a sky: not an echoing canyon of sandstone clouds constantly dissolving sedimentary landscape into always the into of somewhere; sometimes isn't a dark night cry of lovers' gone pricked with stars like memories or needle-hopes: isn't sometimes centuries upon millenia upon moments of flattened, alternating black and blues like the scrolled-out map of time written in three phoenix inks, sun's return; departure; re-return in new-fledged form. Sometimes it's just the sky, sometimes a field of clear air stroked by invisible fingers, and breezes like cats' purr – but still there's that falcon, a solid fact, bookmark of reality compressed from feather blood and bone, squeezed clean by distance to a restless dot: a single point distilled from motion and blackness floating on the clear aguardiente, Ouzo, mezcal of a slow dawn's light; – but also... And then again... Then again, there's the falcon, and then there's the falcon's shadow... no, not the real one telegraphing along the ground its' one-word warning for every rabbit to read for miles that can and for miles “RUN!” “RUN!” “RUN!” The shadow I speak trails back through minds of hairless apes that have no more inborn need to fear, hate, love, covet, or even occur that there is a falcon than a pebble does... that one, say, the mud-colored clot of stone with one white streak teasing through the browny-grey like my talking through this now – that streak knows falcons and their shadows: knows the messenger of Zeus hanging, hovering in slow and terrible spirals towards the doomed city below; knows Horus post-betrayal winging his feathery cry across the desert: “Find my body, sister, lover! Piece me back together with the returning year.” That streak of quartz has heard the echoes falcons give who are no falcons of flesh and blood at all, who are loves and myths and magics transformed to falcon-shape fleeing the smoke and steel and dry unbelief of a rising century … and then sometimes, again, it's just a sky. |