On the platform, waiting for the train, he wants fish for dinner, berries for dessert, when a bird darts across his plane of vision, and disappears under the overhang of a falling-down garage. Maybe to her nest, a wreath pulling warmth in, even as the sky swallows and spits wet dark over her world, over his. He plants a spear stance with commuters angled into wind and rain. Wonders how this small body withstands such sudden wrath. Does he mean the bird? Or himself? Because surely this man understands relativity, how his math may be many times hers, but not much compared to whales and moons for whom such weather amounts to a pleasant spray, cool on the cheek. Or there’s the smaller immunity of those who live completely inside leaf fold or crevice of bark, spared by providence of physics, and the trajectories of luck that make hail into meteor showers far off enough to go unnoticed by crevice citizens. They go on, mind their business, and trust the light that reflects off the aluminum drainpipe will come again to heat their world, as it has done, day after day, like bells on a string chiming their faith. On the platform, he remains standing, a man who’s amplified his eye via telescope to search skyward for a third-grade picture of himself as part of a cosmos, cheered on by more distant stars. He’s magnified his right to examine microscopic landscapes of fibers the size of trunks, and reasoned if things go outward and inward so easily, they might go farther still in both directions, making him god and insect simultaneously. So he waits for the storm to pass, scene to change, new planes to shift like cells in a filmstrip blinking by, as his eye goes and comes back to itself, having retrieved three new birds rising in flight against the old factory, their bodies lifted by the wind.
a poem by Lee Colin Thomas
