Fly (for Barbara Coddington)

Wind, insistent, brutal, grasps the vehicle in which I sit, lashing and shaking with violent objection.  I sway on the waves which carry the phone's crackle of bad news, bearing the shattered grief that speaks of the cancer which silenced you.

My ear aches for the echo of memory.  Your words have no sound now, they hover and light on mute feather and wire.

Threading her way, like an errant shuttle on the bruised tapestry of sky, an eagle looms, lists, drops and drives, negotiating the woven strands of rain-knotted clouds.  

This is no dance.  The creature's artful arc belies the battle, the balanced bracing of bird against element.  Unseen adversaries, these belligerent breezes waft wings over water in benign atmospheres.

Malignant gales now swirl; pull and pool clotted hope, splayed and spread on a palette of prayers.  Each one hangs now, a hesitant wing in an indifferent sky.

Do the living ever truly know that when the cold persistence of the sustaining breath sucks it back from laboring lungs it whispers into a newborn's chest, expanding, informing, filling alveoli, a prelude to wailing.  

The eagle sings as it strives, a songbird's  delicate strain for one so large, as if the incongruities of existence should remain unexplained.  

The soul needs no air, no thermal currents to challenge or delight, but a song to sing as it leaves the husk of this world to return as breath to the One who breathes; tree, eagle, sky, the mist and the mystery.