[Written in January 2008 for a literary website, devoted to self-portrait and writing, that would seem to have gone offline. Putting it here.]
Nine flights of stairs through the parking garage and out into wind-swept streets. Two thirds of a mile to my truck. The sky is blue only rarely here, near-constant fog secreted by the ocean. I walk.
It happens almost every day. I am distracted, plagued by doubt or longing, barely mustering enough attention not to cross against the light, and then I reach the park.
This was a sand barrens to those who built it, so they planted and they scoured, and they dammed a mountain valley to irrigate it all. The park is a scar on the land but it is an old scar, thus revered, thus partway healed. I watch the birds. There are egrets here, and herons, and red-shouldered hawks — I flushed one last week and it glared at me from the nearest branch, four feet above my head.
One bird watches me. It is resident there, and prominent, and yet most days I do not see it. It sneaks up on me, hidden by branch or stone wall or some cloud it places in my mind. It waits for the right moment.
It shrieks me out of myself. A voice like saw blade on stone. Mischievous mind in the mist. The sound grabs hold of my spine, my neck.
My shoulders lighten. My jaw unclenches, opens in involuntary smiling, my mouth changes shape. I lose myself.
This bird my cousin, our common mother dead 310 million years and yet it speaks in words some part of me still comprehends.
There is a world wholly outside me and a world wholly within, the boundary between the two impossible to map.
“We are! We are!” An unholy cacophony of laughing id. My eyes feel suddenly and woefully focused, facing one limited direction at a time. This world a bird’s panopticon.
“We are! We are!”
My skin tingling, fingers suddenly long, absurdly trailing. A commonality of hair and feather. A convergence of mind’s evolution. Would that I could shove against the ground with one great flex of shoulder, hide myself among the mist and branches. I would head for the Pacific. Let the shoreward wind lift me. Let the fog obscure me. Let the dew condense in beaded droplets on my nape.
We are.
1 comment on "Apotheosis"
Oooh. This gives me shivers.