Apartment Lot, Day 3

Tuesday, Sept 22, 2009, 6:25pm

I'm watching the sky today.  It's grey like stone, like slate, after another rainfall last night.  It's pale and murky like smoke, marbled like an old ashtray, and how appropriately--the way the fog of smoke pulls into the receptacle, folds into itself, becomes it.  I'm sure the sky is collecting more as we speak, ashes on the wind, bits of dust and dead leaves, pollution from cars, invisible.

I hear a bird, see his dark shape fly toward the maple above me.  His flapping is quick, his wings shuffling like a brand new deck of cards.  I can hear the sounds of domestication even here, where there are no games, no queens or kings, no spades or diamonds, no numbers.

But wait, that's not true.  There are all these things.  This is where they came from: nevermind the plastic-coated playing card, the illustrations and symbols.  This is the source.  Nature, from which we all evolved, from which we've borrowed things like queens from bees and kings from lions, words from what we've seen: nature's way of worship and authority.  We've borrowed our numbers from the contents of ant hills and rabbit warrens, from their cold, dark tunnels.  We owe our spade to the arrowhead, our arrowhead to the stone, and likewise the diamond.  We've dug up our playing cards from the earth, from the soil and roots, our shapes and lines from the sun and the horizon.  Nature now has competition for gameplay.  Nature gave us competition.

And nature plays games of its own.  Two birds are looping the distant specks of their bodies around one another, somersaulting or chasing their way into the sky.  They barely notice the sky, it is so wide, so invisible up close, but from here it is cradling them like floating ash.  And what if gravity worked backwards, if everything on the ground were to lift and then fall to the sky, if that was down and this was up?  Did we make our playing cards reversible because we were afraid of gravity?

A helicopter buzzes against the grey like a dragonfly, cutting through a powerline, passing over trees.  A plane passes in the opposite direction, crossing the invisible X of air.  Our machines are in many ways weaker than the sparrows which spray through the sky, a half dozen of them now, six of them, I am counting, what they taught me to do.  They were specially designed to defy gravity, play their games in the sky, not worry about the mechanics of anything but chirping.  Sometimes I wish I could fly.  On a plane I'll get the window seat, watch the clouds, the landscape so different up there than down here.

And now suddenly the birds are spilling sideways in the light, like someone tipped the ashtray--dozens of them now, alive and moving faster, lightly, more freely.  Night is coming, and they know it as the sky turns pink and white, know that their shapes and lines of sun and horizon are colliding, coming together like they are, themselves, in rhythm.  Their numbers are rising, and they're ruling the sky like our jets and exhaust fumes could never know, reigning like monarchs, diving and chasing and somersaulting, no up nor down nor here nor there in this game, just turning the world on its head.