April 2011
When the bird awoke, the wind had stopped howling and a stillness could be felt in the particles in the air. Small creatures with wide eyes and small ears darted about the bird in curiosity and fear. These creatures were the children of the wind and they wondered where their father went.
The bird could feel them around it, nipping, sniffing, and biting lightly with small pointy teeth at its feathers. But still, it did not open its eyes.
The children knew, like their father, that the bird was strange and unusual. Unknown.
And, just like their father, it wanted it gone.
The bird stayed still for many hours, but deeply aware of its surroundings, it felt the slow rise and fall of the sun in the sky, and the coming and going of the tide. Everything was so quiet and calm, now that the wind had gone. But all day, the children of the wind, would not let the bird rest, both curious and afraid of what it was, until, as the sun went down under the horizon, the bird opened one of its eyes.
Gliding through the misty morning, the bird flew a great distance from its home. It flew through the clouds that covered its wings with dew and over dark, hollow chasms that startled it with their depths, but still it did not open its eyes.
The bird flew for five nights and five days until it finally could not lift up its wings and landed on a small island stranded in the middle of a tossing sea.
The wind was blowing hard, almost flattening the trees bordering the beach, screaming and howling at the bird, trying to ruffle its feathers and scare it into flying away. The wind did not know the bird, could not understand it, and refused to let it stay on its island. For this was the wind’s home, and it was its beach, and the bird, with its thousand eyes twinkling like stars, blinded the night where the wind was king.
But the bird remained, unmoved, its head under its wing, used to howling capricious winds that lived on islands or at the top of mountains, and it slept.
The bird did not know the world beyond its nest or its mountain, but one day it awoke and knew that it must fly.
There was something calling it. Something it had never heard, but knew and recognized and felt. An urgency through its body, pushing it, tugging at it. Until it could only open its wings, grand and majestic, covering half of the sky, and fly away. And still it did not opened its eyes.
(part 1)
Once upon a time there lived a bird with a thousand eyes which sparkled on its body like twinkling stars in the night.
It lived on a high mountain in a nest made of bones and moss. Nobody knew where it was from, or what would happened if it opened its eyes, for they were always closed.
“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic — the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of syncronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.”
—Charles de Lint (via pada-viya)
Listen
For Shirley (weisse wiese)
Me reading: A Crown of Autumn Leaves, by Annie Finch.
Note: This was harder than the Sylvia Plath poem. I just couldn’t find the right rhythm, and my tongue kept twisting around usually easy words for me to pronounce. This is the best I could do.
