Beautiful Bird
Robert Vivian
Beautiful bird and beautiful door knob, beautiful light-bulb and beautiful nail bent down
in the wall like an old man doubled-over in laughter or anguish, beautiful wallet and
beautiful seashore where I wander into a beautiful painting of the sea with beautiful
waves in the beautiful distance beckoning me, beautiful stone on beautiful nightstand
taken from beautiful river 70 miles away that calms my racing blood, beautiful wind-
chime on neighbor’s beautiful back porch sighing Sing song, sing song in fey notes
of forever, and beautiful barking of multiple dogs with lifted muzzles trembling for the
blues, beautiful window and beautiful contrails high in the beautiful sky rising ever
higher, always ascending, always dissembling, beautiful pilots and beautiful flight
attendants named Brenda and Roy, beautiful sunlight shining down on beautiful
backyard in Michigan and beautiful dust motes light and airy as beautiful stars drifting
weightless and free and this is beautiful also, beautiful rock and beautiful scissors in
beautiful playground two blocks away and the beautiful hands of beautiful children that
shape these beautiful gestures of somewhat primitive tools in quick movements of
surprising alacrity, beautiful ballpoint pen gnawed on by someone named Homo Erectus
who never learned how to shave and beautiful paperclip with hairpin curves that
prefigure a beautiful garden tended by former hell-bent berserkers who have forsaken
their violent ways and embraced the lilting delicacy of flowers, beautiful incipient age
spot on the back of my right hand as I write these words, beautiful candle and beautiful
flicker in beautiful bowl filled with beautiful rose water in beautiful fragrance
of hereafter and heaven hath no other bouquet like it, beautiful egg in beautiful
refrigerator sitting securely in its beautiful Styrofoam pocket snug as any astronaut or
snow-white breast, beautiful bar of soap curved like a beautiful dune whose beautiful
lather shall wash across my body in foamy exfoliation and the jettisoning of dead skin
cells along with those of any other bather who runs its slippery slope across their skin
and under their armpits, down their chests and between their legs with great industrial
relish, and then beautiful bird again calling me singing beauty, beauty, calling no one,
Hardy’s darkling thrush on a wire become a robin then a sparrow then a kindly old
woman manifest as mercy, and beautiful birds everywhere as they alone know the true
rushing power of air over their wings and dive in it the livelong day, and one beautiful
bird, la promesse de Bonheur, as Stendhal put it, “the promise of happiness,” to know this
deep inside oneself where another bird lives and still another and another, birds of
wonder, birds of great and noble poetical utterance and soul stirring elixirs, beautiful
birds of card tricks, playful birds of creative high-jinks and flurry of feathers falling like
careless lovers, you a bird and I a bird soaring and bird chirping and pecking at
sunflower seeds, red bird, yellow bird, blue bird headlong for horizon, Dodo bird long
extinct and clairvoyant bird seeing with splintered golden eye into the heart of a vast
mystery, and bird along the skipping goes, bird inside the hallways in a Catholic school
where two girls in uniform skipped down the scuffed linoleum floors years ago
singing Paul McCartney’s “Silly Little Love Song” when I was in second grade and I their gut-
shot admirer watching from a doorway with his heart in his mouth and something like a
sigh coming out of it but softer, so much softer its down of air, their long, tumbling hair
shot through with shafts of beautiful sunlight, sweet bird of beautiful memory lifting me
out of myself as the bird in me rises from my body and soars away into song becoming
beautiful smoke beautiful song again then beautiful echo, beautiful yearning and
beautiful cocktail, beautiful bird hollow-boned for flight and heaven in a song, a trill,
bird singing, scales laden-bright and free ascending releasing shower of arias within and
sing the beautiful song, sing it, beautiful bird and beautiful life raft in the beautiful
neighbor widow’s dream of drowning and beautiful car coming down beautiful street
belching beautiful black smoke choking this beautiful world, and beautiful bird still
singing, still praising, oh, you beautiful, beautiful bird, so beautiful all I can do is sing
you, beautiful bird, oh, beautiful bird responding with beautiful song, both of us with
throats sore and swollen with praise, singing, singing because we cannot help it.
Robert Vivian is the author of The Tall Grass Trilogy, Water And Abandon, and two books of meditative essays, The Least Cricket Of Evening and Cold Snap As Yearning.