Sky Full of White Birds, So High They Might Be Clouds

By Michael Hettich

1.

On windy days, seagulls huddled on the windowsill outside my parents’ bedroom. I’d stand by the window and watch them and wonder at my skin and heavy body, while my parents moved around downstairs with the radio news turned low. My father’s shoes in the closet smelled like living animals, and I thought about sweat. And then I decided to stand very still, until my hearing vanished and my eyes grew skin. By the time my mother called me down to dinner I’d have vanished for a little while. I wanted to tell them how it felt to disappear. Instead we talked about those huge nets fishermen throw from their boats, nets that open up for miles to strain the ocean bare of living things.

Mushrooms grew overnight, all over the back yard. Sailboat masts clanged in the harbor, where we once saw a seal, where we often saw dead fish and condoms and trash. Boys my age would catch horseshoe crabs just to turn them upside down and watch them slowly die. Boys I was friends with caught nets of minnows they spilled out onto the dock, just to throw knives into their bodies, just to see how long they would flip-flop after they’d been cut in half.

The seagulls hovered overhead, with other birds I still can’t name.

2.

Then I was a small boy high up in a winter tree, afraid to climb down. There were alley cats above me, prowling and yowling, and I wondered where my friends had gone, who’d climbed so much faster and higher, laughing down at me. There were pieces of cloth in the tree’s twiggy branches. Down below, frozen puddles and the ashes of a leaf fire. And then my friends, standing on the ground, were laughing up at me. And I was laughing too, though l was freezing and afraid to move.

Dead swan by the water’s edge, huge and filled with seaweed. Dead swan by the water’s edge, big enough to climb inside...

I slept on a beach, out in the open, under a towel, covered in sand. In the middle of the night large creatures pulled themselves from the ocean and settled down near me.

Birds flew all night there. I slept by listening.

The soul is a circle, someone had told me, when I was young and impressionable. So I tried to imagine what such a circle looked like. I knew something inside me was clear like spring water yet grained like wood and fragrant like pine woods early summer mornings. I knew something inside me was happy and clear and would always be that way, no matter what else happened.

And if we came across the vivid breath, blowing through an ordinary landscape, would we stand still and inhale, or would we walk on, safe in our smaller selves, free of that feeling that takes us beyond and leaves us abandoned, out of breath and hungry. Like a stone no one picks up to build with or to throw.

Underneath that stone, thousands of insects, some of which no scientist has named, are building deep houses and secret tunnels underground.

3.

I walked all day, pulling through the branches, each of which was dotted with pussy willow cotton balls which turned, as I walked further, into pieces of cloth caught on thorns all around me, and ashes that had fallen from some huge distant fire. There were small forest birds flitting here and there. The ground was sandy and covered with sharp leaves...

Then someone said he remembered when the wind had blown backward, and when it had blown without moving.

And then someone else, who knew all the stories about wind, told us how it grew hair and barked, how it blew down your house, how it made things wear away, including its own body, way back when the world was solid and new.

And I can only tell you more than I know because I am a student of rhythms and breath, because I am a student of gestures and blinking, because I am a student of the guts and groans of horses in a field of glittering tall grass, of small birds flying through that tall grass without brushing even one blade. Then landing there to sing, safely hidden in the grass...

4.

An old woman sits alone in her kitchen in her large house in the suburbs.

Evening falls. It’s been drizzling for days. The TV is on, but she isn’t listening. She is drinking steadily, looking at the air. Every so often she says something, the same phrase each time, but we are too distant to hear her. Dark fills the spaces between rain drops, as the rain starts to fall even harder. She gets up, wincing, and walks to the living room, where she stands in front of the picture window. Then she puts her palm flat against the glass and says something loudly, in a slurred voice, twice. She falls into an easy chair and starts to cry, as dark falls across the living room, where a small reading lamp is turned low. The house makes noises around her in response. The dog stands by the doorway watching her cry.

There were fish inside the rain drops that fell today, so small they were eaten in a breath by the air and the lizards and whatever else was hungry. When I watched carefully I could see them flip-flop a few times before they vanished.

Reeds shudder ripples as a school of minnows shivers through.

A spider makes a web between our fingers while we sleep.

And the sky is full of white birds, so high they might as well be clouds, flying to some foreign climate, somewhere far away.