Birds
Birds, the most ardent to live
of all our blood relatives, live out a singular destiny on the edge of day.
Migratory, and haunted by solar inflation, they journey by night, days being
too short for their activity. When the moon is gray as Gaulish
mistletoe, they people with their own specter the prophecy of nights. And their
cry in the night is the cry of dawn itself: cry of holy war with the sword.
On their wing’s
beam the immense libration of a double season; and
under the curve of flight, the very curvature of the earth… Alternation
is their law, ambiguity their reign. In the space and time they hatch in one
flight, their heresy is that of a single ęstivation.
It is the scandal of the painter and poet as well, assemblers of seasons at the
highest places of intersection.
Asceticism
of flight!... Birds, of all our table companions the
most avid of being, are they who, to nourish their passion,
bear secretly in themselves the highest fever in the blood. Their grace is in
combustion. Nothing there of the symbolic: simple biological fact. And so light
for us is bird matter, that it seems, backlit by day, brought even to
incandescence. A man at sea, smelling noon, raises his head at this scene: a white
sea gull open on the sky, like a woman’s hand against the flame of a
lamp, raising in daylight the pink transparency of a host’s
whiteness…
Falciform dream wing, you shall find us tonight
on other shores!
Saint-John Perse