A Convergence Of Birds (11 page)

You heard my questions but only smiled, so I sat out in the backyard in my overcoat and waited for another color to come to mind. None came just then. Mother helped you down so you could sit beside me, Robert. It was then you suggested that today, my birthday, proposed an idea, one that might develop into other ideas. Today, yes today, you continued. Today we won’t be staying home like we always do because today is your birthday, and so we will go traveling, like air, like songbirds.

I reminded you I wasn’t fond of birthdays—they represented death’s knell—reminded you that you were hesitant of leaving the house. You insisted, however. You wanted me to see something. And now I must confess, Robert. You were courageous, our mother was strong and our sisters were young, our poor father, though gone to heaven, was capable, and the world was shallow, hollow, insubstantial but promising insofar as it was yet an empty white box. How reluctant I was to break the trance cast by that quince, the mansard-roofed bay-side house, the fenced yard.

Yes, I said. Go we will, and the parrot can eat or drink and if not, die. So we studied your maps, we talked and planned and as we did, the journey came toward us even as we inclined toward it. This was not to be some usual trip. But we admitted to a shared passion about the proposed excursion, which seemed to involve magnificent trains. And weren’t we delighted when the parrot descended from the ceiling and became a part of our more common world? It seemed a sign that all boded well and through the quick of my tedious doubts it cut.

Pasted with fondness, or do they say plastered, we were going to attend a holiday parade. It was early afternoon and you were mad with merriment and clapping your gloved hands for effect, knowing that while I have never cherished vivid displays of celebration, I would not break my promise to go.

Nothing would rain, sleet or snow on our parade today, I thought, still the nonpareil worst birthday celebrant ever. I dressed myself and helped you dress. We put on birthday hats and set out together to range across the field of dead flowers, leaves and bramble, going forth to the station in town under an abundant sky of pure anonymity. No snow today, I thought again, but rather some interior mist, like a private grief hidden behind my hundred honest frowns. Mist like that which we remember rising sometimes from the Hudson back when we lived in Nyack. This, and the certainty of the very slow progress of typical marching bands, the same old floats, some several clowns, some majorettes, and a variety of other wondrous, monstrous stuff at the end of the happy line.

Mother of course accompanied us, Elizabeth and Helen too, and foursquare we brought along thoughts of home and the quince tree in the yard and the chairs under the tree by the fence out back. Not to mention the hibernating rosebush there, which we might have strung with lights had we not gone on this excursion.

Our train ride was uneventful. We listened to the clacking of the steel wheels on the tracks. I bought hot coffee in the cafe car, and brought you tea with an old slice of lemon, no sugar. We passed a pleasant time together, then discovered we were there, having arrived along the main street of just another modest town—representatives, all of us, of the slow progress of being living souvenirs on a plain day, a day as common as a gift of a box full of worthless cutout artifacts given by a boy to his brother, his mother, his sisters, his friends—or else given to nobody. Here was Main Street in an ordinary town on an ordinary day, naked in its ordinariness. This is what you said and I believed you.

You said my gift to you—like yours to me—of coming outside into the world was a good gift, but that sometimes the giver can be confounded by what may come from out of the blue (euphemism yours) in return.

I thought about that, but said nothing again, having nothing to give you back. So we traded bodies, and traded them again, as we rolled through town hoping to find a good place where we might sit on the curb and watch the parade. We rolled with sisters and mother (and maybe father’s ghost) on through this modest town that put me in mind of boxes populated by emptiness. Rows of complex boxes reflecting the colorless clouds that limped along overhead, no prouder than the dry rags they were. Dry white rags of clouds that were young back then, but nevertheless dry as that parrot’s beak back home, from cardboard carefully cut.

Past, olden music strikes up, now, a tin horn somewhere, and a drum snares. A yuletide melody maybe. A horse carries the parade master, who has lost one of his polished liturgical boots in some other promenade. A leaden grin plays at his lips—theirs, in fact, both horses and masters. A large candelabra on the starlets head and another on the dunce’s, all their many wicks burning bright. What a show, I begin to think, as we settle in to watch with the rest, people standing and people seated around us. The large, meditative crowd laughs and claps as the horse, master, starlet and dunce plod forward somehow, the horse’s white coat having now turned chestnut brown, whereupon you ask me did I see what happened? Did I see the starlet blush as the dunce winked?

You know I have no answer and so don’t question my silence. We know one another pretty well, being brothers. Nor do Mother or Helen or Liz or the ghost of our father intervene, being as they are quite caught up in the grandeur and hilarity of the procession.

Now a fish is next, exotic, raising its fist not in defiance but as to hold aloft a striped orange and black balloon. And in the yellow wicker basket of this great balloon, a crew of foreign dignitaries is sipping champagne, it would appear. Top hats and tails on the gentlemen, who have fiery eyes; and a filigreed gown on the lady, whose face is a sincerely beautiful steam locomotive. Like parrots and bits of ancient lace—like the house and quince and lawn chair and rosebush back home, and like you yourself, old owl Robert—trains are truly beautiful. And this one is glossy black with silver trim. Imagine that.

Hooplas and huzzahs from the crowd for what comes along next. I miss whatever it was, but it doesn’t matter, because I glance at you, bearing witness to your growing contentment, and this is gift enough for me. I witness contentment in our mother’s face, too, and in others’—enough, or almost enough.

Cut, paste, carve, you say. Arrange, rebalance. Go on, you say. Put your hands to the scene itself.

Proud as punch next come senators, fresh mollusks, highway patrolmen, gymnastic almanacs, waving cabriolets, pimps juggling clementines, caribou and zombies, the major himself and other deities, together in a feathered swan float, singing some mahogany chorale. Thereafter, devils and angels and curious harlot pumpkins. The alphabet block, the toy Judy, the commemorative spoon from Marseilles. The wicker fence percussion band, look and listen. The Golconda beyond my power to deem. Robin Hood in a nightgown is here, and so are the many marbles in his head. A Wassily chair waltzes the Matilda. Music by Gluck, Mussorgsky and an acanthus leaf in frosty flames beyond the reach of any mathematician. Pennies are forged by various dirty vendors along the route, beside the burgeoning road, and other pennies are lost. The marionettes carry shards of glass gingerly and gingerly again. Whistles blow pink smoke as a huge Catherine’s wheel twirls away above and beyond the history of all technology. But, more. Whales’ teeth follow between the sleep and the sleep, eating the wild dust of other gadgets while they go. Nothing is a third wheel. Everything tells a story and the story is that everything tells the story.

A wooden crate is carried along, now that we near the end of the procession, held by hands too burdened by the weight of it to count. A candid hush falls over the crowd. It comes, it goes, and we are left behind in thrall as the choir within it of mockingbirds, borzois, gazelles and the rest of a comprehensive bestiary launched into some haunting song of faith that promises like decoupage a kind of richness, in which reveling in detail becomes a feast of experience.

Robert, how we both cut up.

Pastel weather begins to depreciate further chances for continued exposition, and these hundred fat bears on tricycles bring up the rear. One musician Cupid seems to have lost a wing and lies on his side, ignored by everyone but us—we who go to him where he’s fallen in the broomed dirt lane—and while it is true that he courageously waves us off, preferring his agony to our charity, his remaining wing does seem to twitch. Not so bad, you say.

Won’t he be forced to fly in circles from now on, though, given that he has but one wing? I ask.

We all fly in circles, you answer. It goes on, you say, it goes on just fine, and I believe you because we’re brothers. Better one healthy wing than none, you add.

This makes me smile, and I begin to think, Robert, as the sun dims down and the last train to Utopia Parkway awaits us at the station, whatever it was we saw this day, you seem to be more fortunate for it, or fortuned by it. Mother and sisters more fortunate, our dead father, and I more fortunate, as we say goodbye to the modest town of boxes less empty than I might have imagined, and watch the landscapes slide by us beyond the scratched windows of the train taking us home, retracing our way toward that unplush shoebox where the rosebush, the arranged chairs, the birdhouse on the fence, the quince, and all the growing collection in my head of precious artifacts made by hands of mortals, and, yes, the very idea of home, await us.

Not to mention our monastic parrot, or is it a parakeet?

Passing under Utopia’s horizon, the sun had gone. You asked me did I remember that turquoise elephant which, during the parade, danced on a glass bubble blown by a mauve butterfly? Whereas I could not remember such an elephant, nor bubble, nor butterfly, I knew if I opened my eyes I could imagine such things.

You misquoted our mutual favorite poet that evening after we finished dinner. Some days, you said,

Some days as if they were

People or trains or sleepy quince

Trees, do retire to rest, and

In soft distinction lie

Or tell some various truth.

That day had been good for a birthday, truth to tell, after all. That day changed the shape and color of our house, and any world beyond.

Robert, how young we were. Mother, sisters, even Father. The world was young, going to war yet on its way back from war. Promising as an emptied, empty, emptying box. Whistling as the formerly unsung air toured it, the world and the box that was the world, soughing like someone breathing, and how it declared this little universe could be fulfilled, and you agreed with the speaking chill breeze that promised the empty box would be filled with fresh minutiae from your life, from mine, from every life ever lived.

I came along to see the parade at your kind invitation and this is my letter of gratitude. If I hadn’t been there, it would have mattered. But I was there, for you, and you, old friend, old owl, were there for me. A parade of amazements. Life enclosed in an intoxicating turbine casket.

More, you say. There’s more.

Yes, the moon is somewhat edged by a pale orchid, though my eyes are exhausted and my mind may be playing tricks to trump me. Too, there might be truth in what you saw in dusklight—several warblers, crisply carved and brazenly painted, returning to their nests, having tired of the heat of untimely climates. It may be true their breasts are speckled black on yellow, and that some of them are dappled with reds and greens and blues. But by what magic did those cracker crumbs vanish while we were away?

Birds. What more is there to confess? The December day was plain as paste no longer and I knew what color to cut in for the parrot’s beak and so did you. The beak was, like the day, the fortnight, the year, the world, unhinged, forever quince and blue and green and gray and red and black and orange and white and every known color and unknown and simply: bird.

The parrot is animate, beautiful, always bright. As are the quince, the moon, the yard, and the house in which we dwelled together all those unforgotten years. Or so we tell ourselves and thus we believe, being brothers, being believers as we are and will be, opening and never closing our crypts of cutouts, and the pasts, nows and futures they manifest. That night, before you slept, we saw meteors lighting the sky, flying like wings outside your flaring window. From the starry dark an impossible nightingale sang you to your rest.

Joseph Cornell

UNTITLED {AVIARY}

1948

21.25 x 15.125 x 6.5 in.

mixed media box construction

Martine Bellen

1.

She, who’s over-conscious of her cage

Formed from heat, moisture, frost, concealment,

How it drips, freezes, fogs

How it forms columnar cracks gashed with glass

Toward the blue peninsula, gravity flight

The visible half of reflection

Attempting to obtain the solidity of an object

Or to remove the clothing of sound, genealogical anxiety,

Disrobing at the Hotel Eden

Inventing a way in

To that which is built over concept

2.

Behold, Thoreau sings for owls, Dickinson hummingbirds

Still life enframes world of spectacle

Or object-spirits

Dewish mute

The Pyramids are letters, some die inside

Cul-de-sac feelings or Stonehenge numbers

In twilight the lamp illumines ideological will

A weaving of walls, movable wicker

& caravan carpets strung twixt reeds

Our ground breathes, floats, as we wander

Into cosmologies, cosmogonies

Immeasurable emblems of circumference or protractor

3.

She developed the disease of demonic enthusiasm

On looking at a nymph,

Mystic hunt through childhood, histoire of fountains

Dominating the jardin canary parasols

Perpetual noon antipasto sun creme ballerina

Idyllic dying swan

4.

Wire-netted cage papered with constellations

Promises of progress or unfoldment from her magic prison [torso]

She traces an analemma, her eyes infinitely distant,

Maps night sky or soap bubbles