The wind goes crazy around here in the autumn.
I forget myself, and my sweatshirt barely clings to me.
Wait.
There it goes! It's off! Rushing away to join the biggest flock of birds in the world, and then (in an
instant) I am the biggest flock of birds in the world, swooping and diving with my brothers and
sisters who are all me and in me and it's confusing like grass is confusing, like being is confusing,
like bodies are
confusing. And we're all headed south and we're so worked up we can hardly stand it because we
are birds doing what the biggest flock of birds in the world does, which is dance along the crazy
autumn wind and head south, and block out the sun with all our little bodies so people will come
out and look up and children will laugh and point and everyone will say that has to be the biggest
flock of birds
in the whole, entire, world. My sweatshirt spreads, it gets bigger and bigger until it's a map, a map
that covers everything with a big red line on it pointing south, and we all watch the map my
sweatshirt makes on the ground and in our heads and in the sky and everywhere else, because no
matter which way we turn we all see it, until it covers everything and all the way to the horizon is a
huge, blue sweatshirt-map, and every little town in the world is on it and every little stream is on it,
and every joy is on it and every sadness is on it,
and every sadness is a leaf, a leaf on a tree that clutches a tattered patchwork to its spindly branches,
until the wind rushes in whispering you need to do what trees do, and they twist and shudder in the
wind until they are empty, loose teeth pulled with love; and every joy is grass, and it waves long
and wild and tall no matter how you cut it down:
don't forget this.
We tell ourselves, each other, the wind telling the birds telling the trees telling the sweatshirt telling
the leaves telling the grass, and in a rush of color all that tattered sadness gets swept together into a
whole, a tapestry, a cyclone of reds and goldens and yellows and oranges that rushes before us in a
stampede and all the joy gets swept up in it too and mingled with the leaves until none of me is
quite sure where the sadness ends and the joy starts we just know it's ecstatic and wild like a dancer
or like the absolute biggest flock of birds that anyone anywhere has ever seen or like blackberries,
and I am not gentle,
not even in my sleep
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