A Convergence Of Birds (3 page)

of the well-dressed American poet

who sat each day in the French garden

writing obscure madrigals on paper wings

“He says we are all fictions

but that he believes in us anyway”

The day stretches out infinitely

At the Hotel Eden where the hour is always the same

even your mind can only imagine the present

“It is a great relief” I admitted

Apollinaire smiled around the stem of his pipe

and said “It pleases the Chinese poets especially”

From the balcony I gazed out across the blue gulf

A woman in a tiny white boat rowed alone

with the clock’s missing hands

“She never stays long” explained Apollinaire

“I’ve heard she prefers the Hotel de l’Etoile

on the other side of the horizon

where even the starfish (those masters

of every element) dive down from the sky

to hear Orpheus tear his throat each night

with the song of his eternal longing”

Joseph Cornell

VARIETES APOLLINAIRES

1953

10.5 x 11.5 x 4.5 in.

mixed media box contstruction

Rick Moody

We do not know precisely the rate of growth of the young

in immature birds the neck is reddish brown

Too soon marred are those so early made

A lot of hugging, holding hands sometimes. He always

used to push the hair out of my face

Both briskly preen their feathers

I’m an insecure person

Dynamic gliding is used in particular by large sea birds

All Americans are entitled to enjoy a private family life

With love’s light wings did I o’er perch these walls

We were both aware of the volume and sometimes

I bit my hand—so that I wouldn’t make any noise

The acoustic performances depend on various internal and external factors

The constant use of the beak inevitably causes wear and tear

please be my friend

The true thing is shading into the imagined thing, all right?

Many of the 30 or so gifts reflected his interests in history, antiques, cigars, and frogs

This is a matter of sex between consenting adults

For never was a story of more woe

The curious nuptial display of the Great Crested Grebe

The difference in quality between different territories makes it more convenient for a female to choose an already paired male

He needed to acknowledge that he helped fuck up my life

Harming him is the last thing in the world I want to do

The remedies for the irrational consumer onslaught of our society do exist

The sun for sorrow will not show his head

Classification of birds:

pheasant, grouse, gull, loon, heron, coot, stork

You want me out of your life,

I guess the signs have been made clear for a while

We met, we wooed and made exchange of vow

Flight is undulating and irregular

I didn’t have any panties on. I’d probably be in a mental institute without it

Young birds are paler in color

I may be subject to the upbraidings of all

who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony

And what I assume you shall assume.

The girl floats around in her nightgown.

C’mon, it’s me

I intend to reclaim my family life for my family

she had complained that he was making no effort to get to know her

she wanted to have sexual intercourse with him at least once

Call me but love and I’ll be new baptized

The nest is made in a hole, in rocks, or in a tree, often near water

what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is

Every day can’t be sunshine

And I assure you this information will be kept strictly confidential

As soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes

I thought I fell in love with this person who I thought was such a good person

A rose by any other name

Woman’s body at auction

It usually increases any feeling of awe or wonder that you’ve got going

Our position could not be more clearly stated

Nuptial activity demands high expenditure of energy.

She told me I looked fat in the dress

The air sacs that form an extension of the lungs are present in certain reptiles.

More love with a little bit of obsession

I’m sorry to bother you with this

But definitely love.

Joseph Cornell

ISABELLE {DIEN BIEN PHU}

1954

18 x 12 x 6 in.

box construction with glass, painted wood, paper collage, and mirror

Joyce Carol Oates

UNTO EVERY ONE that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. So Jesus rebukes the Box Artist, who is not bold enough to seize his subject.

The Box Artist must constantly troll for happiness. La Puente. Cerritos. Olympic Boulevard. In this cruelly deprived Year of Our Lord 1935. This summer in which dried, cracked earth of the hue of baked blood is turning to dust, blown by a Santa Ana wind. Traveling the streets of Los Angeles anxious and yearning as any rejected lover. The Box Artist must seek his happiness out there. The Box Artist understands that happiness is chance, and always unmerited. The Box Artist understands we must create the improbable circumstances of chance that the yet more improbable circumstances of happiness will be revealed to us.

Cypress, Alvarado, Santa Clara. Westward, eastward. El Nido to the south, La Mirada to the east. To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box. The Nickel & Dime Diner on El Centro Avenue. Amid boarded-up Storefronts GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! BANKRUPTCY! MUST SELL ALL! A clatter of trolleys, automobiles, and trucks and the heat haze stirred by the wind into a glowing phosphorescence of dust and grit. At El Centro and Cupertino, a building marked the LOS ANGELES ORPHANS HOME SOCIETY. Weatherworn red brick set back in a large, mostly grassless lot surrounded by an eight-foot mesh-wire fence. What the eye first notices about this building is that there are few windows, especially on the uppermost third floor. These windows are tall and oddly narrow, like squinting eyes; on the first floor, the lower halves are crudely barred. Peeling white “colonial” trim, tarred roofs, rusted fire escapes, and at the rear amid sand and thorny weeds the rudiments of a “playground.”

A more melancholy “playground” I have never seen and I swear that it was this playground that initially drew me, and not the possibilities of the orphans—for it is rare that the children are released from their work duties to “play”—and at the time of my first visit, in the late winter of 1934, the playground was deserted.

Only by chance, at another time, did certain possibilities suggest themselves.

In the Box Artist’s life of anxiety, yearning and sudden unexpected happiness there are such moments. One must only seek them without ceasing—as Saint Theresa spoke of prayer without ceasing until prayer becomes the very soul, and the very soul, prayer. It is as if the automobile makes this turn unbidden by me onto an unpaved service road beyond the orphanage. Scrub palm trees, broom sage, and hardy purple-flowering thistles coated in dust like exotic works of art. A flock of sparrows scatters at my approach.

How many weeks it has been since I discovered the Los Angeles Orphans Home. How many weeks observing the orphan children from my automobile, hunched down beside the window in the passenger’s seat. When moved to take photographs, carefully I ease open the door—carefully! The Box Artist is a master of precision. The Box Artist is a master of discretion. No one notices the Box Artist, for he is as near to invisible as any adult male, of indeterminate age and with no distinguishing physical characteristics (even my height and weight oscillate from day to day dependent upon temperature and barometric pressure), might be. My automobile attracts no suspicious eyes, for it is a battered 1928 Ford, its shiny black exterior and dashing chrome worn by sun, rain, wind, and wind-driven sand to this dull pewter-glow that is the very absence of color. The Box Artist is but an eye, a pair of hands, a fierce and implacable will.

You would identify the children of the Los Angeles Orphans Home as orphans, even from a distance, in their faded-blue clothing that fits them like smudged daubs of paint, with their worn shoes, their spindly limbs, and raw scrubbed faces, like the faces of wooden dolls with awkwardly fitted glassy-teary eyes. They are “children” in but a technical sense. Many of them are midget adults, with heads disproportionate to their thin bodies. Even the youngest are not “childish.” Such terms—”children,” “childish,” “childlike”—apply solely to wanted children. There is a recognition of this fact, or complex of facts, in the slump of their heads and the sag of their shoulders and the limpness of their legs even when they are engaged, under no adult’s supervision, in “play.” (The playground is sand and concrete. A meager set of swings, only just two, the third having been broken for months; a tarnished slide; a wooden teeter-totter.) In the late morning and again in the late afternoon the orphans emerge from the rear slot of a door, trudging outside to blink in the mica-bright sunshine, dazed with exhaustion from their work duties (what these are, I can only guess, though a few of the younger and more hopeful run for a brief while and a few, always boys, as if recalling the bold maneuvers of children beyond the eight-foot mesh-wire fence, will push at one another and jostle for possession of a swing, a seat on the splintery teeter-totter.

Weeks, months. My photographs were few and infrequently inspired. Yet every time the orphans appeared, my heart leapt in hope. A scrim would be drawn, as in a film theater, and I stared, stared—but the one I sought wasn’t among them. Until one afternoon, a hot Santa Ana wind blowing out of the Mojave Desert and my eyelashes gummed with dust, I saw, I suddenly see, the Blond Child. A girl orphan I have never seen before, yet recognize at once.

It is she. She is the one. The one the box awaits.

In the late summer of 1935. In the earthen-floored cellar of the bungalow on Sacramento Street, East Los Angeles. Thirty-two wooden boxes stacked neatly against the walls and in each of these boxes was a “capture”—a snapshot, a small artifact, a stuffed, lifelike little bird. To the neutral observer the works of the Box Artist would be indistinguishable from trash, but each of the boxes was, to the Box Artist, a testament to those minutes, hours, sometimes days in which the box was executed. Even the relatively uninspired boxes, and there were some of these, were triumphs of a kind; they represented, to the Box Artist, the solutions to specific problems. The box is the affliction for which only the box is the cure.

Yet each “capture” was solitary. Each of the boxes stood apart from the others, though they were crammed together in that dank, airless space.

The one the box awaits, at last. The Blond Child, a little girl of eight or nine, swinging on one of the swings. She is new to the orphanage; at least I have never seen her before. Already in her faded-blue uniform she resembles the others—except for the fierce radiance in her face, and the speed in her little body. How desperate, flying on the swing with its crude creaking chains and hard, splintery wooden seat; how defiant, kicking and bucking, her white-knuckled hands gripping the swing above her head and her thin arms stretched taut, like a bird’s wings partly wrenched from its body. Both her knees are scraped and bruised. Her “dirty blond” hair is curly and snarled. Her eyes are intense, staring; her dazed soul shines through her waxy-pale skin. A beautiful child, though wounded somehow, damaged. The sorrow in being born, without love.

She is one of them, now. The orphans of the world. Waiting to be loved. Waiting to be taken—”adopted.”

I think—I will adopt her. I will claim her!

I will make her hurt, mangled mouth smile.

But of course, being the Box Artist, I can only take the Blond Child’s photograph. And that only in stealth, hoping I won’t be detected.

My heavy black box camera is gritty with dust. It’s an old camera; I am forever blowing dust off the lens, polishing it with my handkerchief. After a few minutes I become reckless and leave the protection of my automobile to squat in the dirt beside the mesh-wire fence, hoping to be hidden by tall weeds; aiming my camera with the assurance of a hunter as, oblivious of me, the Blond Child swings ever higher. Her hair is ringlets sparked with fire, her skin glints like mica, her eyes are ablaze like tiny blue jets of flame. As she swings, her skirt is bunched over her bruised knees, there’s a glimpse of white beneath, much-laundered and frayed orphan’s underwear it is, and her heels kick upward, reckless as a colt’s. The Blond Child swings carelessly off-balance, veering crooked and nearly falling from her seat as if her secret wish is to fall and crack her head on the dirty concrete. No! no! I whisper to her. Don’t injure yourself; the world will shortly enough do that for you. In the creaking swing beside the Blond Child another, quite ordinary girl is swinging, not boldly at all but in a lackluster manner; an older, slump-shouldered girl, one who has been waiting to be adopted for years and has all but given up hope. But the Blond Child is new to the orphanage. The Blond Child will never give up hope.

I promise. Someday. Something—maybe.

The Box Artist is the artist of desire. The tenderness of desire that can never be consummated.

The Box Artist plucks the child’s flying image out of the air as you might pluck a feathery little bird out of the air, a canary or hummingbird, small enough to fit in your closed hand.

The heavy black box camera grows heated with the effort. The shutter snapping! The mysterious film within, wound past the lens, imprinted with the Blond Child who is oblivious of it. (And yet, afterward I will wonder: Was she aware of me, in fact? Crouched here behind the mesh-wire fence, in a patch of dusty weeds? Was she playing a game, as precocious girl-children do, watching the Box Artist through lowered eyelashes and giving no sign—except a sly little pursing of her lips?)