Episode #11: A Suitable Vessel For Magic
God In Drag
God In Drag - May Twenty-Fifth, Twenty/Twenty
I see you. You are wearing your yellow beak today, and a very round orange waistcoat over your voluminous belly. You turn your head one sideways and then the other, preening and calling at my window screen. Exactly in the spot where I spend the most hours day and night. This corner, this window, this light, this chair. You are already handsome in profile, but when you turn your back to me and lift your silvery wings - ! I see that you finally got the Dr. Who frock coat you always wanted. When you ruffle your silk feathers to show me the finery I close my eyes and empty myself. I let your full bird in.
This is your spot at the southwest edge of the property. The corner of the hedge with the old wooden telephone pole and a tangle of lines. A power spot no doubt, where all junctions of wire meet, where the sun sets, where the light falls in the right way. You rock on the old black line, now hanging half-slack to this side of the house. Doing a Philipe Petit dance on the wire. “You are God in drag,” as Hafiz says, and I love you.
Not only do you perform on the high wire, you perch on the backs of the three iron chairs facing my window, and suddenly swoop across my field of vision to suspend on the rose bough attached to the lattice, just out of sight of the window. Then you fly back to one of the chairs to look at me straight on. This is why I empty myself: to let you know I can register the enormity of you.
Then Squirrel shows up in your territory. I see the brown fur slithering in the glowing interstices between the branches of the hedge. You scatter him, actually chasing him down through the inside of the hedge. That’s when I know you are just showing off - it’s too much. I get on my knees in the white armchair with my elbows on the window ledge. I make eyes at you through a screen so ancient that it’s mesh is more gray than transparent. When I put my palm up against it you are very interested. Tears run down my cheeks and you are still there, still there. I stay, even though I really have to pee after my morning shake and coffee and water and pills.
I stay as long as I can, as you call and cackle. Then that I realize the storm windows are still down and that I’ve been looking at you through a double veil of glass. I manage to wedge the sticky wooden windows up in their sashes, push the aluminum storm windows up into their proper slots, and slide the screens back down. There. That’s the proper procedure for summer. Thanks for letting me know.
I know. I know there is no real loss. There is a space for us. It exists. I’m preparing ground to meet you, and dance with you, turning in circles in whatever form you have. Like that feeling I had when we knew we were in love that felt like a spiral of fire in my belly. I told you about it that first night on the phone in the dark. And in our last room at Mount Sinai in the dark, when you could no longer speak. I told you I would know you by that spiral, and I would find you that way. This is too personal. I don’t want to speak about whatever territory or God there might or might not be. Its ridiculous to etch it on any piece of paper or computer screen. But where else can I hear myself?
At dusk, right on schedule, the fat seagulls squawk and squabble over scraps as Mary’s Cafe dumpster truck grinds its wheels. Two blue-black crows gesture in the air before landing on our cement birdbath in the back yard. They rise in a mirror image, touching beaks, and then land again. I put my elbows carefully on the sill of the tiny window of the pantry to watch. The one on the rim chases the other off to be the first one in the bath. The other then takes its turn showing off, having a leisurely bath, dipping its head, sitting and ruffling the liquid completely through its feathers. When they fly off I go get my hose to replenish the water.
Reminder:
