The song that is the bird unseen

In India they tell the future from the flight of birds.

-Eliot Weinberger, “The Dream of India”

Image: Joaquim Pla Janini, Mariposas de le Caridad 

Title: Nod to William Carlos Williams, excerpt from “To All Gentleness” 

Every man has a piece of sky in his breast and in it flies a swallow

I actually saw it happen. A bird falling from the roof of a building. The bird let out a little cry as it dropped—one story, two—then, just as if it had hit something solid in the air, it bounced into flight. Hardly back on the roof, it was falling again, and falling, letting out that cry. But were the falls failed attempts at flight? The bird seemed to be throwing itself off the roof—falling on purpose. Out of the plunge perfected, flight pushed up as necessity. There was thrust behind it—the fear of falling. And with each practice fall, the cry lasted longer until the cry became a run of notes, a flutter along the avifaunal scale. Out of the fall, the cry shivered up and down, the natural embodiment of thrill. Suddenly, I understood. The bird wasn’t practicing flight. It knew how to fly. The bird was teaching itself how to sing.

-Susan Mitchell, "Notes Towards a History of Scaffolding"

Images:
1st image: found
2nd image:  Front and back of a page from Aram Saroyan’s Pages
3rd image: Blake Ogden, Bird and the moon
4th image: found
5th image: Etienne-Jules Marey, Analysis of the Flight of a Seagull, 1887
6th image: found

Title: Nod to Fatos Arapi, Sultan Murat and the Albanian

My Flight

My flight is not away, not to or from.
Rome, though in the distance, is no farther
than the dresser.
-Rod McKuen, excerpt from “Rome Itself”


Photo: via Google images