My Grandpa

He was discovered for the bird wings he kept under his bed.- oh it was too little a thing, a thing off odd comforts to him, how he would reach down to that gap, a gap o no more than of four inches,. And he’d pull himself out some finch’s wings, tiny without being petite. He would sit with them in his palms, a little gristle working its way downwards in slow drops as he rotates them in his hands, look at it from all angles. Here it is the sail of a ship, and in the distance another ship. Rotate, two arches, architecturally sounds and cold and brown. Rotate, he sees two wings broken off a bird rotate there is nothing sinister in his analysis. He rotates them until they are no longer a pair of bird wings, stares at them so long his memory for the shape grows dull, as might yours when you say “cupboard” a hundred times, and know that it cannot possibly be a word. Just a strange combination of sounds, foreign and difficult, and it wants to go back, to pretend you can set cup up on it, but that shelf cannot escape.

He does this with the wings, looks at them from every angle until they simply cannot be wings. “Wings” won’t sit for them, they are outside the stream of words, their metaphor ill and porous and leaking cold yogurt all over the place and the gristle and the object disappear. The man is still holding something, but once-wings have moved, just barely beyond language, sublimed by their complete immersion in his eyes.

At this point he grows dem wings to his back and flies off, He spreads the gristle like chickenfat across his shoulders, and plops the once-wings right there, where they grow and melt and meld because it is so strange when something that “is” in a way that we really can’t say goes and touches something that is so surely as he is, things get confused. His backs screaks and scruffles, his profile seesaws to blind as his nonexistent cinematographer focuses in and out of the scene. His not-wigs let him light on the ground– he’s not flying with ‘em, which would have all the peace ease charm and pudding you want in it, but he just walks, --no, lights. He touches the ground like a half-assed plan, tossing it about in his mind until a stronger option emerges. To walk is to make a series of formal compacts with the ground, to deliver force and receive resistance. But for him there was no deal, no certainty. He might, just, touch and light and be content to stand or stroll or jump for a second. He might.