Author's Commentary
A little closed off?
In your car we used to touch our socks to the cold windshield glass and white heat would seep across the gray sky, the roofs of houses, the sleeping trees. Then we would pull away and the lakes of missing toes would flood and break. Our heat was swallowed then, by the silhouetted feet and by the ocean of the sky, and disappeared for good. I feel that I am the good in the world.
I could put my cold fingers in your mouth and rest them on your burning tongue. Your teeth were sharp and strong. Your tongue was wet and still. All around my fingers your lips were glowing white and weak against that extension of my body, that I was pushing hard into your body. I would think at that time about the heat that moved between us then; the sense it made to think that because you were so warm that my fingers must have felt a lot like ice, and that it was a sign of who loved the other more. But still, I feel that I am the good in the world.
A dead bird hung wrapped in boxing string between a beaded necklace and a black pendant on a chain from your middle mirror and it swung entwined in the two like the pendulum over the pit. A broken sparrow with gray unsettled eyes, dirty white chest, wings painted with the dead brown of drying blood; it swung head down and feet bound with their soles exposed to the bleak winter light which was settling nervous all over your seat and lap. Occasionally we would break from each other and one would run their knuckles up the side of the sparrow. It would swing away from the hand, swing between the lakes of light and back again; in the same way it's body would look when caught in falling flight between the branches in a tree. Exactly the same except for the deadness of the eyes, which caught and ate the shadows and the light all the same: pulling them down and buried in a fog, denying anything a dynamic inside, withholding and cruel.
In your car nothing is sad, just warm. The deadest birds, here, are warm. You put your hand into my hair and held my head against the plastic handle on the door. Your hand was warm against my scalp. You cooed and cooed with your other arm wrapped around the steering wheel and your eyes against your arm. I kicked the stick shift out of park and we rolled back slowly into your neighbors car.
My socks froze to the leaves blanketing the street as I walked backwards with my hand in the air. You didn't turn to see and I figured that I was standing at the end. One Hundred and Fifty Sixth street was steaming from the drains, big clouds leaned into the trees and they crackled or shattered or sat for a moment, filled. Even in the early morning nothing was still. TV sets inside of skinny street side houses were talking, sputtering cars slid past with similar sounds, and if it was a colorful noise then the black and white cracks of ice and asphalt being ground dulled the whole.
I made it up the incline to the parks up on the hill, and they were white and crystal still. The fountains were drought scars without the summer water and the homeless were tucked inside the inner rims with their black trash bag tents taped against the marble slants. I sat on the precipice above a sleeping man, and listened to his dreams. He was drowning in the cold.
I wanted to see the pigeons on the square, but it was colder now so they were hidden somewhere else; on the arch works of the city buildings to the north, in the wind ways on the skyscrapers across town. I would check for bodies in the early winter but it was getting futile now, a disease bird might die on it's feet, but in the coldest parts of the year they all died resting on the edges of glass windows hanging over boiler vents. A man with a terrible nosebleed lay shaking on a black steel bench; the cold air of a city pond swept over him and his knotted hair shook like heavy grain in the wind.
He whispered through the clots of blood caught inside his mustache, “Come here, come here,” and I leaned in close to his face, “I should get outta here, I want to leave. This is a real cold city.”
I whispered back, “You should leave, wouldn't you like to go somewhere warm?”
His right eye was sunken and motionless, the blood slipped slowly out of his nose, “I want to leave.”
“You should, I think you could.”
“I could go south, to the beaches.”
“I think you could, wouldn't that be nice?”
“Yeah, like a bird.”
“Yeah, can you see yourself flying on a warm wind?”
“Flying...”
“You're rising on the thermals, way above the park, and you're feeling very nice. Very light.”
“Yeah, going south.”
“Yes.”
His eyes were closed now, mouth open behind thick black and red strands, “Put your hands on my face for a second, would ya?”
I pressed my palms over his eyes. They were sticky and frail, like eggshells on the floor.
“It's real dark. I'd be a night bird.”
“What kind of bird are you?” I asked in a soft voice.
“A songbird.”
He leaned forward into the air for a moment and then fell back with a sickly moan, and I stood up. He was gaping at the sky and fighting to focus on something. He caught me the left eye and the right remained untrained on the graying cover above, he was fighting then for air, “Hhh...”
“Roll over, lay on your side.”
“Hhh... I'd be a songbird of the night.”
“Roll over.”
“Hhhh... what about you?”
“I don't know.”
He coughed a drowning cough and I pulled his jacket from the arm, up onto his side, and his awkward head tumbled down to look between the flat black bars across the bench. The heavy blood curdling on his beard sunk and dragged the hair down across his mouth. His blackish hand appeared from the collar of the coat and combed a hollow over his teeth and remained entwined inside the beard.
My hands too were black and diamonds with his sweat, rubies on the heel of my palm until I scraped them on the concrete blocks and rubbed until the filth was ground into the floor.
Your bedroom, last night, was a lot like the bird men of the park. The mantle and cabinets were full of quail and waterfowl arranged across small islands of winter grass and dirt; each one missing it's eyes to make room for the glossy black beads of taxidermy. You asked from the darkened corner of the room, “Do you like them?” and I could only nod slowly and I ran my thumb over their foreheads and to their cheeks. They were lit uncomfortably from a low light built into the cabinets at their feet; it was a light that they would only come across in this special death.
It seemed later, hands raw against cement, a strange parade.
I made my way back out of the city park and back to the busy streets. Found my car frosted over in the all night lot with the pay tag cold glued between the wiper and the glass. I forced the door open and sat with my hands on my ankles while the heater stumbled and rose to life. I put my hand onto the plastic fins across the vent and with my thumb I adjusted the volume knob on the player until the car was full up with fog, hot air and the lonely song.
Fss.
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