Shining Horns

Nature Writing at Raven Chronicles Online

Allen Braden

Flight Theory

What makes the chimney swift approach the sky

Is ecstasy, a kind of fire

That beats the bones apart

And lets the fragile feathers close the air.

Flight too is agony,

Stupid and meaningless.

--James Wright

His only desire

to do with her body

what air does to a feather.

--James Bertolino

The barn swallow knew

				     all of her eggs

but one

		would be obliterated.

After death, when one of her talons

was carried into the fire ants' den,

that swallow lived again.

		    			Certain consolation

spells agony. Ask the Puritans, they knew.

Such was not the case

	            	    	      for a hummingbird

that blundered into particle board

newly raised in its flight path...

the beak

		impaled inches deep.

For the Museum of Natural History and Wildlife,

workers jig-sawed around the limp body.

Everywhere,

		   the same story spreads

its wings.

I'm talking about the police chief

shooting down a heron.

				    Right there

at Main and 1st.

That was Grandview I think.

Or Prosser. Could have been

anywhere.

		 It was something to do.

Something for small town humdrum.

Locals argued

	       		which special interest group

would be first

	    	       to take offense.

I'm talking about the gulls and crows

wheeling above a tractor

ousting nightcrawlers and gophers

into the sunlight. The birds dove

						and swallowed,

their shitting so bad

the farmer constructed a flail:

a broomstick with baling wire

did the trick.

	   	      You wouldn't believe

such hardship. A woman I loved once

loved me the way girls want horses.

It's true but not what I'm saying here.

Not exactly.

	  	    I'm talking about seasons

of owls smothered in the granary.

Bet there's more to that story.

Can't drive through the countryside

without dead crows dangling from fence wire.

Be clever: Say murder.

Tonight's sunset like the sheen

on John James Audubon's

		      			 dissection table.

No, like love spread-eagled against a wall.

An evening full of starlings

pouring through the air like unchecked water.

I held her and we witnessed, 

		         		   still no closer

to comprehending flight.

How many nights did I try

to retrace the complexities

of starlings with my hands over her skin?

I've double-checked the pica and font.

I've got my theories.

				Story of cruelty

without meaning,

how is it you always insinuate

yourself amongst those syllables?

Audubon killed what he loved best.

Come on, don't look so surprised.

And what about the scene

you insist on making?

			  	  A story

has to start somewhere. I'm told

on his mantel Vermeer

kept a flute

	  	 carved from a swan's wing bone.

Nothing knows the wing like wind.

Let's pretend the first angel

throttled a white swan for its wings

and its nest

	  	     in our hearts. 

Tell them Wm. Blake sketched his wife

and sang to her for an hour

then dropped dead and that's a fact.

Dear metaphor,

let down your hair for me,

put on your black silk,

your best 

		 "come hither."

Don't fail to fall off the tongue.

Beautiful. God, yes.

				Fruit is bound to rot

and flies descend.

Wave them off,

	       	         they return.

Persistent as sperm.

I'm talking about that summer

the syllables,

	   	       multitudes of them,

darkened the sky above us.

If I ever see her again,

			           I'll speak

of pebbles transported south

in the crops of a million birds.

Tell them, will you?

A feather rests on my windowsill

and when the baseboard heater

kicks on as I write this,

that feather dances

		     	       a little.