Suspended and Not Vapor

1. A flock of pigeons burst into flame while circling the pond.

2. Waiting at an airport. The time is situated within the hour that is referred to as four a.m., but remains outside, removed, or parallel. I see it more in terms of a distance than of a time; tomorrow is east of me. Color is some sort of herald. An angel is a messenger, or the message. My grandfather brought back from a mountain a block of obsidian that must have fallen from this sky that was just as black. The message is in the fluidity of change, as the sky heats it's alchemic oven this obsidian melts into the violence of purple, a bruise, then pastels of reds, blood, and finally from a primal black stone comes gold, the daylight which invites or insists on the immolation of secrets. The ghosts of dreams evaporate from the light let in as the sleeper opens his eyes, or flee into shadow, awaiting the movement that comes from the vastness of night.

3. Dampness draped the black air, hung from very low clouds over a city. Within the clouds rested many of them, who had come to witness a birth. They hovered, whispering amongst themselves as to where and how. Magi of sorts who were immune to the deceptions of the senses, blind, invisible and bodiless. But they could feel their own world bulging against that of the other, ready to burst from the violence that only life has when it breathes and exhales it's own. The older of them patiently rested in the mist entangled firs while the younger took advantage of the wind to flow rapidly down the streets or through the cracks of windows and doorways seeking that profound confusion that is death.

The Beloved and his father stood on wet grass and withered strawberries, shivering because of the wind, and framed by the dripping golden haze of the light from the porch. A pistol was the sole source of warmth in the Beloved's hand. Perhaps the sound of it piercing the sky had stirred up the winds. The father had returned to the hazy golden house, the young man we call the Beloved could just make out whispers in the air around him, while what rode the wind sensed his will of resolute power. They knew in moments another would be born. Neither compassionate nor malicious, indifferently they caressed his body.

  The image of his father framed in a dripping warm haze sent him tumbling, falling forever into what could be called his self. It was the image of a father who smiles, and who was seen from the inverse of infinite light years from within a body not yet fifteen years old, his name resting on the lips of the Beloved as perhaps a bubble might, when a bullet provided the necessary release of pain brought on by an eternal and lonely vision from so far inside his skin that a body was forgotten. The dampness was strange that clung to him, and he was afraid of what he no longer could see, but was led by winds he could now understand, as he was relegated to the realm of image.

  Born under the sign of the wound, as an infant the Beloved was baptized with the scalding water of a teapot by a father who sat drinking endless scotches in a room so cold that breath issuing from the child's mouth was a fine mist of crystals as he lay writhing and screaming on a dirty floor. When the father could stand no more, and realized that the squeal of the teapot was louder than that of the infant, he simply emptied the contents of the former onto the crying form of the latter. The child was soon sealed in hate and henceforth let no one in or out. But the hatred was not yet focused, for it needed an object to latch onto to become real and tangible. At the age of fourteen that object had become his self, and for hate to be known as such it must first experience its converse, love.

  This love had been felt for another boy a year older, who at the funeral stood apart from the rest, who did not know him, under the overhang of a granite tomb, drops of rain rolling from it's roof to the soft soil beneath his feet. Absence had taken residence in his chest, an abscess that gnawed at what substance he was made of until he felt that he would collapse should he move.

  To steady himself, the Lover stared at the inverted image of a tree that reflected in a clear pool of rainwater until he could no longer see it. It had become a hole in the earth that he entered, descending through the muddy roots and topsoil, while wondering if his love had been here before him. At the bottom of this hole, slippery wet leaves covered the ground. He looked up to see the world of the living through the puddle and could see an image of himself distorted by drops of rain. Low clouds formed a sort of sky that was punctured here and there as if it were lightning by the roots of what grew above. Several crows hopped from branches looking back at him and cawing, so he followed, making no noise, to a clearing where the Beloved sat atop an Indian funeral pyre, with two crows perched upon his crossed legs.

  He was still the beautiful boy he had slept with, though a void rested in each of his eyes that served to make him untouchable. On the assorted branches and twigs sat a crumpled photograph of the two of them, sitting on an unmade bed, laughing, that a friend had taken of them the previous week. The dead Beloved attempted to pick it up, but was stopped by one of the crows that quickly clasped it in its black beak and flew away. The pyre then ignited and the lover could hear the boy attempt to speak through the rising flames, but terrified the Lover ran back to that hole in the sky from which he had earlier descended. From a distance he could be seen retreating from the funeral, resembling a crow hopping amidst patches of yellow grass under dark rows of firs.

 

At the underage club where they had met the music was louder and speed sales up in the one bathroom adorned with vomit, syringes and spray paint, and the need to fix a reason for this significant death danced with the spaces between those who knew this boy. When the Lover entered the club, after wandering off the hours that followed the funeral, those who saw him so mud splattered, moon skin in filthy black suit, were kept from approaching him by the imposing feel of absence. The Beloved's death articulated an affection with no object, a void.

  The Lover knew that the course of events had seen the slow mining of every pleasure from the boy by those who would want only to fuck his sorrow, or his golden brown skin once wrinkled by the scalding water of a teapot. A boy who had seen everything as his fault, and wanted nothing short of annihilation, but who for two weeks before his suicide attempted to allow another in, an attempt that proved too laden with sorrow to prevail.

  The Lover had slipped into the father's home the day before the funeral, having been provided by the Beloved with a key for early morning meetings, and had taken the gun. Now in the club the sounds of drunken and misplaced sorrow were pushed into oblivion by by memories too large to accommodate what threatened their borders. He wanted only to get high, to push consciousness into the grave with the one whom he loved, but had no money.

  An overweight and frightened trick sat quickly drinking and eyeing the teenaged Lover who looked so sad in his muddy black suit. He was just the kind of nauseating person the dead Beloved would have picked up just to make himself feel worse. The two of them fucked in an alley, and the mud on his clothes made him think of the earth that now covered his beloved, and with this man over him, entering him, he could only hold the image of the boy whose sorrow caused the winds to blow to a source that summoned only death.

  His own grief mixed with rage at what becomes of people who have no choice in being brought into existence, and this feeling filled his heart and spilled onto the rain soaked streets. The pistol was finally warm from being in his hand so long, that when the man had finished, the trigger was easily pulled.

The wind picked up slightly, and what rides it gently lapped up that substance that is the source of life and death in these moments of transubstantiation.

4. The moon is in triple decline, shadowed by the earth, wrapped in fog, and near it's disappearance in the sea, it is a celestial cadaver, orbiting the head of the world as some profane halo.

5. The birds common to the area where I am accustomed to sitting before work are extraordinarily active today. Whereas they usually group according to species along the fountain, in the trees, or on the ground among the cafe tables where I sit, today they dart from one area of the square to the other, back and forth, mostly alone, and lost amid all the other birds. Counter to this activity is the sight in my memory of innumerable sparrows, half devoured, in the paralyzing inertia of decomposition, scattered along the sidewalks of my childhood neighborhood.

  Here are a few stills from this montage of nostalgia; the chicks, with bald and oversized heads had a certain obscenity not inherent in the corpses of other, ground dwelling animals that had publicly expired. How, I wondered, could they have fallen from the sky when there was nothing contained within it to fall from? What called them to the earth in this last fall? A black cat, bleeding from the mouth in the street on my way to the grocer's one morning, belonged on the ground, to the ground, in a way. Birds should have floated away.

  A family of hawks returned every spring to wreak terror upon the local, smaller birds. They would cry out in rapid shrills when swiftly falling on an unfortunate, lone sparrow. The sparrows would sometimes as a group try to divert the predator should they be near, but more often than not the hawk would snatch the bird in mid-air. During those summers we could also often see a snake writhing in the hawk's talons, or a rat's tail waving beneath it's broad wingspan as the large bird flew to the awning over the house on the corner where they nested summers in a row. I perceived this cry that the hawk would sound as some devise that would freeze the prey in fear.

  One summer, when climbing behind the garage with a friend, I found a body of a recently killed hawk. I spread its wings to over three feet of ornately designed feathers of several shades of browns, grays, and black. After showing it to my friends, we imagined it to have lost in a fight with a cat, crawling to this remote site to die of shame. We gave it a funeral based on what we knew of Egyptian Pharaohs.

  The crow and raven were mysteriously anti-social, always seen observant and alone. They were more in league with fog, shade and trees than with other animals. Their principal occupation was not the busy hunting and gathering of the other winged creatures, but time spent hunched in the firs, or perched on houses, watching humans. At times I thought that they sought my confidence, other times that they stood in judgment of me.

  I remember when two sparrow chicks fell from a nest in our roof. I placed them in a small box filled with dry grass and fed them each hour, keeping a lamp over the box to keep them warm. One morning I awoke to find them standing on my chest, chirping to be fed. I then decided to teach them to fly. In the backyard there was a shrine to Saint Francis, who I recalled having been a friend of birds, so it was from there that we began. I would hold them and gently toss them across the lawn and see their attempts at flight improve each day. After my father died my family went to the east coast for the summer. My birds I left with friends of the family. From the Howard Johnson hotel room in Connecticut where I sat watching Speed Racer cartoons with my brothers and sisters I called to inquire about my bird's health. They had died shortly after we had left.

  I paid no attention to Robins as they epitomized boredom with their flat gray and rust coloring. They appeared under the azaleas each morning after a rain to pull worms from the lawn, and were always present on the way to school, forecasting the uniform monotony of both the weather and school routines.

  Chickadees were quite the anomaly. They wore the black hood of the executioner and were allied with his activities, yet their play and movements were entirely frivolous. Occasionally I sighted a Bluebird as a hopping patch of bright color within a dark thicket of bushes or small trees. One bird I knew only by call, which resembled a telephone dialing. I would never see it and could not imagine its appearance, or preferred not to, as if to do so would betray it's successful stealth. For a time I had two pet ducks, Yacky and Daffy, who would follow me all over the backyard sounding out their funny little quips. In the winter when the wading pool would freeze, we liked to put them on its surface to laugh at their attempts to be figure skaters. After they had matured the opossums that lived in the honeysuckle bush dragged them under the porch where I later found the mutilated carcasses.

  I have seen only one Woodpecker, a few Owls, which after sighting I dreamed of them flying sightless, with maggots falling from where the eyes should have been, through a forest at night. I have seen two Buzzards while sitting atop a hill that glided so close that I could see their wrinkled heads and hear their wings slicing the air.

6. Hosts of angels fall from grace in delirious rapture. The prison of faith crumbles as they feel the joy of a fall that contains no consequence. Some extend their wings to catch the air, slowing down so as to prolong this feeling, others pull them in close to the body, speeding and intensifying it, and rush headfirst into the void. A god stripped of companions cannot recall why he did not create for himself wings as magnificent as these, and longs to also leave his empty heaven.

7. Sitting by the fountain once more. A large fly strikes my arm, loses balance and falls on it's back, next to my hand. A sparrow abruptly lands, looks at me, then the fly and devours it. The bird looked at me once more with one transparent wing protruding from its beak before taking flight.